Drive down Maple Road past the Bloomfield Town Square strip mall this month and you're about a mile from two of the most expensive private construction projects in the township's history. One just wrapped after four years. The other hasn't broken ground yet. Both cost more than most residential streets around here are worth combined, and this fall, neither one will let you inside.
That's not a complaint. It's just the shape of the year. Oakland Hills Country Club spent four years and roughly $96.5 million rebuilding a clubhouse that burned to the ground in 2022, and it finally reopened this spring, gates firmly member-only. A few miles north on Franklin Road, a Detroit chef is now clearing forest for a 700-person luxury event venue that won't seat its first wedding until late 2027. Meanwhile, the actual fall calendar for people who live here runs on a school farm and a township parking lot. The contrast tells you something real about how this place works: the headline money moves slowly and stays behind a fence, and the daily texture of the township keeps going without waiting for it.
The Clubhouse Almost Nobody Will Walk Into
On February 17, 2022, a fire that started with a propane torch during patio construction tore through Oakland Hills Country Club's clubhouse, a wooden structure that had stood since 1922 and hosted six U.S. Opens, three PGA Championships, and the 2004 Ryder Cup. Members watched a century of trophies and memorabilia burn in real time, though quick work by firefighters and staff saved most of the prized artifacts.
What came next is the part worth paying attention to if you live nearby. The club didn't rebrand or reimagine. It rebuilt the same footprint, the same ten-pillar white veranda, the same silhouette against the South Course, the Donald Ross layout Ben Hogan nicknamed "The Monster" after his 1951 U.S. Open win there. The project, branded "The Next 100," broke ground in December 2023, ran to nearly $100 million paid through insurance and member assessments, and came in ahead of schedule. Members held an Easter Sunday brunch inside the finished building on April 5, 2026. The formal unveiling followed on April 27 and 28, with general manager Marc Ray telling reporters the building "was not simply rebuilt. It was reimagined with intention, guided by history."
That restraint, choosing to replicate rather than modernize the exterior, says something about the character of the institution and, by extension, the neighborhood it anchors. Oakland Hills isn't trying to look like new money. It's spending new money to look exactly like old money. The club is already scheduled to host the U.S. Women's Open in 2031, the U.S. Open again in 2034, and five more USGA championships through 2051, so the new building has decades of use ahead of it. None of that changes what a Bloomfield Township resident can do this weekend, though. Oakland Hills remains a private club. The rebuild is a story about the neighborhood, not a place in it you can visit.
Half a Mile Away, Someone's Already Building the Next One
While Oakland Hills was finishing one nine-figure project, another one was starting nearby. Chef Zack Sklar, who owns Mex and Beau's Grillery and runs Peas & Carrots Hospitality (the group behind Como's in Ferndale, Social in Birmingham, and the Common Grill in Chelsea), announced plans in January 2026 for a new luxury event venue called Bloomfield Hollow. The site sits on more than 30 acres of undeveloped, forested land on Franklin Road, just north of Square Lake Road, inside the township. According to reporting that cited Crain's Detroit Business, the venue is designed to hold around 700 people and will include a sunken amphitheater alongside its indoor event space, with catering handled by Cutting Edge Cuisine.
The plan, as of the initial announcement, was to break ground later in 2026, with an opening targeted for late 2027. The nearest fixed landmark to the site right now isn't a gate or a groundbreaking sign. It's the Bloomfield Town Square Shopping Center, home to an IHOP, a Panera, and an Olga's Kitchen, a strip mall that sits a short drive from thirty acres of forest about to become one of Metro Detroit's more ambitious private venues. That gap between what's already there and what's coming is a fair snapshot of a township that's still mostly residential and still absorbing new investment in bursts rather than waves.
So the pattern holds. One era-defining private project just finished behind a members-only gate. Another just started, and won't open for another year at least. If you're waiting for either one to change your weekend plans, you'll be waiting a while.
What You Can Actually Get Into This Month
The things residents can use this fall are smaller, cheaper, and running on schedules that don't depend on anyone's construction timeline.
Bowers Farm, on Square Lake Road, is run by Bloomfield Hills Schools, one of the two public districts (the other is Birmingham) that the township itself lists as primarily serving its residents. The farm's mailing address technically falls in Bloomfield Hills, but coverage of the property, including a WXYZ segment that opened by calling it "Bloomfield Township's Bowers School Farm," treats it as a shared township fixture, which tracks given how much of the surrounding school-age population lives on the township side of the line. Resident farmer Paul Watkins described the 92-acre property this way:
"It's very diversified, in the sense that it's educational, it's recreational."
The farm's Fall Festival opens the first weekend of October (this year's Michigan festival calendar lists it for October 3 and 4) and typically continues on weekends through Halloween. Last year's ticket price was $17, and the newest addition to the lineup was a corn maze, joining wagon rides, apple cider donuts, animal encounters, axe throwing, and a farm store that sells Guernsey Farms ice cream alongside produce grown on-site.
The township runs its own free counterpart a few weeks earlier. The annual Bloomfield Township Open House is scheduled for Sunday, September 27, from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m., with a bounce house courtesy of Oakland County Parks, fire safety demonstrations from the Bloomfield Township Fire Department, and a family passport that collects stamps from ten stations for a prize drawing. It's donuts and popcorn on a government parking lot, which is about as far from a sunken amphitheater as a fall event gets, and that's precisely the point. It's the one weekend where the township itself, not a private club or a chef's new venture, is the one throwing the party.
Where to Eat Before or After
None of this requires much planning around meals, which is its own kind of relief. If you're heading to the farm on a Saturday morning, Hazel's has built a reputation for weekend brunch, tucked into a strip mall off Maple Road, with a menu built around seafood and the kind of oversized pancake platters that make a farm afternoon feel earned. Cafe ML, a few doors down on West Maple, runs later into the evening with a globally inspired menu if you're looking for something after the Open House winds down. Zalman's on Woodward has drawn steady local traffic for weekend dinners, and Roadside B&G on Telegraph leans into a retro roadhouse feel with a daily happy hour from 3 to 5, useful if your afternoon at Bowers Farm runs long and you're not ready to go home yet.
None of these are destination restaurants pulling people in from outside the township. They're the places that are just there, on the same Telegraph and Maple corridors the township's own site points new residents toward, doing steady business regardless of what's happening at Oakland Hills or on Franklin Road.
The Real Fall Calendar Doesn't Wait
That's the actual takeaway from this stretch of the year. Bloomfield Township's biggest stories right now are both about scale and both about access: a hundred-million-dollar clubhouse that just reopened behind private gates, and a thirty-acre venue that won't open for another year. They're worth knowing about because they say something true about the kind of money and permanence that anchors this part of Oakland County. But they're not what defines a weekend here. A $17 farm ticket and a free Sunday afternoon at Township Hall do that, on a schedule that has nothing to do with insurance payouts or groundbreaking ceremonies.
If you're already living here, none of this changes much. But if you're the kind of person who tracks what a place is worth by watching what gets built and who's building it, Bloomfield Township just gave you two very different data points in the same calendar year. If you're curious what that means for your own street specifically, Logan Wert can walk you through a current, no-pressure home valuation whenever you're ready to look at the numbers.
