Isle Dauphine Golf Club

The Isle Dauphine Club sits on Dauphin Island with three floors of circular rooms, each ringed with windows facing the Gulf. Architects Arch R. Winter and T. Howard Ellis of Mobile completed the Mid-century modern club building in 1957, part of a development by the Dauphin Island Property Owners Association that grew to include a restaurant, swimming pool, tennis courts, and a golf course. The golf clubhouse followed in 1962, the course itself in 1963.

The main rooms follow the curve of the walls — circles within a building, glass looking south over open water. The design sits in the vocabulary of postwar coastal clubs, a period style that trusted geometry and views to do the work. A restaurant has occupied the building since 2015. The club was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2017.

What draws you here is the building's commitment to a single formal idea — the circular plan repeated floor by floor, the Gulf framed identically at each level. It's architecture that doesn't try to disappear. You come for the view the rooms were built to hold, and for what survives of a mid-century island social club still standing where it was raised.