Bel-Air Country Club

For the Wedding Venue, see Bel-Air Bay Club.

The Bel-Air Country Club is a social club located in Bel Air, Los Angeles, California. The property includes an 18-hole golf course and tennis courts.

Once upon a time, in October, 1921 there was an orange grove in Santa Fe Springs that sprung an oil leak that turned into a gusher that produced a golf course 29 miles away that grew to become Bel-Air Country Club.

In the beginning, all the money came from Alphonzo Bell, Sr., for it was he who discovered oil in his 200-acre citrus ranch. Bell then bought all of the chaparral-covered hills between what is now Sunset Boulevard and Mulholland Drive, Beverly Glen Boulevard and the Pacific Ocean.

From that vast acreage, he carved out 1,600 choice acres - part of the former Mexican plot known as the Rancho San Jose de Buenos Ayres (St. Joseph of Fair Winds) - to stake his dream - an upscale residential community with a golf course. Mr. Bell's wife, Minnewa, formed the name of the new community as the "Bel-Air Estates" by a slightly-altered combination of the family surname and the last word in the title of the former Mexican rancho. Fond of Italy as a result of a family vacation, Mrs. Bell then proceeded to assign Italian-based names to many of the streets in the new residential development.

For his golf course, Mr. Bell initially selected an area near the current intersection of Sunset Blvd. and Sepulveda Blvd., on the western edge of the residential community. His mules and plows were already defining fairways when suddenly Bell changed his mind, ordered stakes be pulled up and moved to the present site in the middle of his new residential community rather than on its western fringe.

In early 1925, he engaged famed golf architect, George C. Thomas, to design the new course for the Bel-Air Estates with the front nine north of Beverly (now Sunset) Blvd. and the back nine to be placed south of the boulevard on 75 acres of property Bell intended to purchase from the Janss Development Co. Mr. Bell had entered into an agreement with Harold and Edwin Janss who had become the owners of the 4,000 acres of the ranch land from Beverly Blvd. to Pico Blvd. which they intended to develop for residential and commercial purposes.

Alas, Mr. Bell’s acquisition of the 75 acres from the Janss Development Co. for his golf course was not to be. The Janss brothers had separately submitted a proposal to the Board of Regents of the University of California to sell 300 acres – adjacent to the 75 acres to be sold to Mr. Bell -- for the siting of the new campus of the University to be built in Los Angeles County as the Board of Regents wanted to expand beyond the University’s single campus in Berkeley on the edge of San Francisco Bay. However, concurrent with the proposal from the Janss brothers, Pasadena officials had submitted a proposal of 700 acres, more than double the Janss proposal in Westwood, for the campus to be built in the City of Pasadena.

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