The Discovery Model Arrives on the East Coast

A Club Run Like a Resort

Where the classic American club sells admission to a tradition, a Discovery club sells a staffed day. The course, the trails and the kitchens come with people already assigned, the way a serious resort runs. The guests just happen to own the place. Membership arrives with the home rather than through a waiting list, so the buyer's decision and the family's decision are one decision.

Mike Meldman founded the company in 1994 and proved the idea at Estancia in Scottsdale two years later. How the firm grew from one desert course into a portfolio of more than 35 communities is told in our companion piece on the company. What follows here is the model a family actually lives with.

The Three Signatures

Start with food. Comfort stations are small chef-run kitchens placed out on the property, standing where an older club would put a snack window. The signature dates to Estancia in 1996 and has traveled with every community since. Members see generosity. Operators see the resort idea at its clearest, hospitality delivered where the day is happening.

Then the tee sheet, or rather its absence. Golf at a Discovery club runs without conventional tee times, so a round begins when the family is ready rather than when a booking sheet allows. The convention sounds minor and is not. It moves golf from an appointment to a default, which changes how often the course actually gets used.

The third signature is the children. Family programming sits at the model's center of gravity rather than on an amenity list. The company began staffing the outdoors itself in 1998 at Iron Horse in Montana, with guides and boats under the Outdoor Pursuits name. A version of that department now opens with every new community.

One Model, Five Kinds of Ground

The same signatures run in the desert, in the mountains, on islands and now through fields, and the member's day barely changes between them. The table below follows the model across its settings.

The Careful Florida Claim

One claim needs stating carefully. Atlantic Fields is the first club Discovery has built of its own on Florida's east coast, and the first in the greater Palm Beach region. The company already touches the state on the other shore, where it curates the Naples Beach Club resort on the Gulf. So the honest phrasing is east coast first rather than Florida first, and for buyers on this seaboard the distinction changes nothing about what stands behind the gate.

Translated Into Hobe Sound

Atlantic Fields runs the model on roughly 1,500 acres of former orange grove and old polo ground, developed with the Becker family and holding 317 home sites. The golf is Tom Fazio's, a championship 18 plus a 10 hole short course with more than 120 ways to route an evening loop.

What surrounds the golf shows the model at work. A working farm anchors the grounds, with equestrian facilities on the old polo fields. A lake club, a spa and a performance center backed by TrackMan technology fill out the campus, and trails run into Atlantic Ridge State Park. Next door sits Grove XXIII, Michael Jordan's club, in a corridor that also holds Medalist and McArthur. Those neighbors are golf retreats. Atlantic Fields is the corridor's family address, which is precisely the model's job.

What the Model Costs Here

Membership structure and cost come from the club directly, and no dues figure belongs in a market report. What the published materials do show is the run of release prices. Developer release pricing as of August 2026 opens at $6.7M with the Lakeside Cottages. Release pricing tops out at $15.6M for the Preserve Estates along the state park line, with golf, western and equestrian collections between.

Demand for the model on this coast is no longer theoretical. The community has put 144 land closings on the Martin County books for just over a billion dollars, examined lot by lot in our full record study. Every one of those buyers bought the operating idea described above, since no finished home had yet traded.