No matter the route taken, the parking area sets the tone for the day. Is it overwrought with planters, curbs, stripes, speed bumps and other assorted directional nonsense? Or have you seemingly arrived at someone’s home, as evidenced by an absence of stripes and an informality that immediately puts you at ease?
    
While San Francisco Golf Club and Cypress Point—two very private Northern California clubs with wonderfully austere facilities—offer the homiest of places to leave your car, Rhode Island’s Newport Country Club offers the most idyllic lot (pictured). The place to leave one’s car can be divine when it is a simple grass area immediately outside the clubhouse, with the rows defined by ankle-high boards that delineate parking spaces by members’ initials. 
    
If such informality is good enough for the billionaires who have been through here, it will do for the ideal club.