Martis Camp's New Beach Club Isn't Really About the Beach

"We selected Martis Camp because of its measured approach and respect for both the property and the community it serves."

That line came from Alex Mourelatos, the general manager whose family had run a lakefront resort in Tahoe Vista since 1978. He said it after agreeing to sell the business his parents built to a golf and ski community five miles south of Truckee. The sale closed quietly in the fall of 2025. By this summer, the property had a new name inside Martis Camp's amenity list: the Lake Club. Most of what's been written about it treats the acquisition the way the club's own marketing does, as one more perk added to an already long list. That framing misses what actually happened. Martis Camp didn't add an amenity. It bought a working hospitality business, with its own zoning, its own guest history, and its own fifty years of paying customers who had nothing to do with the club.

What Martis Camp Actually Bought

Since it opened in 2006, Martis Camp has built almost everything members enjoy from scratch, on land the developer already controlled. The Tom Fazio golf course, the Family Barn with its bowling lanes and movie theater, the Aerial Adventure Park, the private chairlift up to Northstar. All of it sits inside the community's own 2,177 acres. The one thing Martis Camp couldn't build internally was direct frontage on Lake Tahoe itself, so members made do with a beach shack and shared access points.

The Mourelatos deal is a different category of transaction. It's a 3.2-acre commercially zoned parcel on the actual North Shore, with a 32-unit hotel structure, a four-bedroom residence, and roughly 275 feet of shoreline that was built out in 1942 and operated as a public resort for decades before the club ever existed. Martis Camp didn't construct an amenity here. It purchased a small, functioning hotel company and is now deciding what to do with the license and legacy that came attached to it.

That distinction matters for anyone trying to read what this acquisition signals about the club's direction. A beach shack is a convenience. A commercially zoned hotel parcel with a fifty-year operating history is a real estate position, the kind of asset a private club doesn't usually need to hold unless it's planning to be more than a recreation provider on that stretch of shoreline going forward.

Fifty Years on One Stretch of Sand

The resort sits in Tahoe Vista, nearly equidistant between the lake's two major shoreline towns, about nine miles east of Tahoe City and seven miles west of Incline Village. Andreas and Mary Mourelatos bought it in 1978 and ran it as a family business for close to five decades, through a stretch of Tahoe's North Shore that has seen plenty of resort turnover but relatively little consolidation into private club hands. The property was listed for $29.5 million in July 2025 as part of a three-property portfolio and drew what one broker involved in the sale described publicly as a large amount of buyer interest before Martis Camp emerged as the purchaser.

Martis Camp Club's leadership has been explicit that the plan is continuity first. Colin O'Hanlon, the club's chief operating officer, said the acquisition reflects a long-term commitment to preserving the lake's natural character, and that the immediate focus is maintaining the hospitality and welcoming spirit the property already had. Board president John Cassidy called it a cherished part of Tahoe's heritage that the club intends to carry forward rather than remake. Those aren't the words of an organization planning to bulldoze a beach into an exclusive private lot. They're the words of a buyer that understands it just inherited a piece of shoreline with its own public-facing history attached, and that the value of the asset is partly the story that comes with it.

The First Season, Nearly Finished

By the club's own account, this is the first summer Martis Camp members have actually been able to use the property, and that season is now winding down. What members got access to this year included:

• Lakeside days at the newly acquired Lake Club, in addition to the original beach shack
• The MC Yacht, available for cruising the lake rather than just paddling near shore
• Kayaks and paddleboards staged at the beach for casual use
• Lakeside dining at the club, a step beyond what the original beach access offered

Back at the Family Barn amphitheater, the club's summer concert series kept its usual rhythm of live music under the pines, with this year's headliners including Chris Kelley, Red Hot Revolution, and Sugar Ray. Camp Lodge dining leaned on Executive Chef Conor Ball, named 2024's Club + Resort Chef of the Year, for the fine dining side of the season, the kind of recognition that doesn't show up in a golf or ski brochure but tells you something about how the club is positioning its food program relative to other private communities around the country.

None of that is new this year. What's new is that for the first time, a member who wanted to spend a full day on an actual public beach, with a working hotel's worth of history behind it rather than a manufactured amenity, could do it without leaving the club's own footprint.

What Doesn't Show Up on the Amenity List

Through the Martis Camp Foundation, members have contributed more than $12 million to local nonprofits and student scholarship programs across North Tahoe and Truckee. That figure gets cited in the club's own announcements about the Mourelatos acquisition, and it's worth noticing why. A private club buying a fifty-year-old family resort invites obvious questions about what happens to a piece of shoreline that has always felt, in practice, more open than most Tahoe frontage. The club's answer so far has been to point to its philanthropic record as evidence it understands the difference between owning land and being a good neighbor on it. Whether that record translates into how the Lake Club actually operates over the next few seasons is something only time will answer, not a press release.

Why This Matters Next Summer, Not This One

Right now, the Lake Club is still news inside Martis Camp. It gets its own paragraph in the club's summer newsletter, its own mention on tours, its own line in conversations between members who are comparing notes on how their first season on the new beach went. That won't last. The golf course and the Family Barn don't need announcing anymore. They're just what summer at Camp means. The Lake Club is on the same track, and by next year it will likely read the same way, a line item on the amenity list rather than a headline.

What won't fade as quickly is the underlying fact this acquisition represents. Martis Camp now holds a small piece of Tahoe's actual public shoreline history, not a private simulation of it. For a community built almost entirely from the ground up, that's a different kind of asset to be managing, and a different kind of promise to be keeping to the family that sold it.

If you're weighing what a season like this one means for the value of your own place inside Martis Camp, Team Blair Tahoe tracks these shifts closely and is happy to walk through what it looks like for your specific property.