Sunrise Country Club is Bill Bone's first Coachella Valley country-club experiment, still sitting on a 135-acre former date plantation next to Thunderbird in Rancho Mirage. Bone bought the land in 1971. Construction started in 1974. He built 746 condominiums, four to a building, around an 18-hole Ted Robinson executive course, par 64, with four small lakes. By the late 1970s the condos were nearly sold out, priced for Southern California weekend houses and for snowbirds from Canada and the Pacific Northwest. The published address is 71-601 Country Club Drive. What happened next is the part that still governs the deed.
Bone kept the clubhouse, golf course, and common facilities for nine years. In 1981 he agreed to sell them to California Golf and Tennis Company for $1,492,000. Then he gave the homeowners a short window to match: $746,000 down, monthly payments of $16,595 for five years, down-payment check due October 30, escrow by November 13. A homeowner committee formed a corporation, solicited $4,500 per household, and closed. Sunrise has operated ever since as two entities under one general manager: the Sunrise Country Club Homeowners Association, Inc., and the Sunrise Country Club of Rancho Mirage, Inc. Separate bylaws, separate boards. Bone went on to build Rancho Las Palmas, Monterey, Palm Valley, The Lakes, Indian Ridge, and Toscana. Sunrise remains the prototype, member-owned because the owners refused to let a for-profit chain take the clubhouse.
The eight original plans still organize the inventory: Majorca, Cabrillo, Granada, Barcelona, La Paz, Seville, Cordova, and Madrid, from a one-bedroom courtyard unit to a 2,000-square-foot three-bedroom with wet bar and fireplace. Official club plan PDFs are archived for Stanton Williams Group research and are not attached to Luxury Presence Files on this page pending rebrand. Confirm the plan name and any remodel in disclosures. Purchase makes you an equity member. The club states that no additional initiation fee applies. Court sports (tennis, pickleball, bocce), the fitness center, and the driving range come with equity membership. Annual golf membership is a separate election at a published club rate. HOA assessments vary by floor plan and are posted on the club site; they change. Verify the current assessment sheet rather than a copied 2025 table. An activities center was added in 2000. Solar and desert landscaping have been added since.
The site sits in a Santa Rosa cove, more sheltered from east-valley wind than clubs farther out. Highway 111, neighboring Thunderbird Country Club, and Palm Springs International Airport are the practical geography. The culture the club still sells is unpretentious and tournament-heavy on the courts. That is a different temperature from BIGHORN or Ironwood up the Palm Desert hill, and it is why Sunrise still reads as a condo club rather than a custom-estate address.
Buy the plan and the two-board structure. Then decide whether you want Robinson's executive golf as an annual add-on. Norman Williams and Jacqulyn Stanton of The Stanton Williams Group at Compass work with buyers and sellers at Sunrise Country Club. Reach Norman at 760.464.2190 or Jacqulyn at 760.702.2557.