Osuna Ranch Finally Has a Timeline. The New Fitness Center Never Needed One.
August 27, 2026
August 27, 2026
On August 13, seven residents drove out to Rancho Valencia Resort & Spa for the Rancho Santa Fe Association's annual Strategic Planning meeting, the one afternoon each year when the board sets aside day-to-day business to talk about where the Covenant is headed over the next five to ten years. Seven people, for a conversation that touched a proposed fitness center and spa, expanded parking at the Golf and Tennis Clubs, a beautified median through the Village, wildfire preparedness, water resilience, and the long-running question of what happens to Osuna Ranch.
That last item is the one worth sitting with. Osuna Ranch has belonged to the Association since 2006. For nearly twenty years, "planning continues" was about as specific as any update ever got. This month, for the first time, the historic property got an actual runway: preliminary design and permitting work with the County is now targeted for fall 2026, with completion envisioned for late 2028. Compare that to the fitness center and spa, a concept that ranked only in the middle of the Association's own 2022 member survey and already has preliminary sketches in front of the Art Jury. It never needed an open-meeting agenda item to get that far.
Every August, Association directors and staff step away from routine business and gather off-site to set priorities. This year's list, according to the Association's own strategic planning notes, included:
One attendee at the meeting came with comments from several neighbors who could not make it because the session was held during a workday. That detail matters more than it might seem. A gathering with a dozen items this consequential, decided by a room this small, is not unusual for how homeowners associations operate, but it is worth knowing if you assume every major project here gets a community-wide vote before it moves forward.
The fitness center is not the first big-ticket item to advance this way. In January 2025, the board approved an $8 million renovation of the Ranch Clubhouse restaurant at the Rancho Santa Fe Golf Club, the building that has anchored Sunday lunches and Friday dinners for longer than most current homeowners have owned property here. The clubhouse had not seen a significant renovation in nearly two decades before that vote.
The design work is being led by Ocio Design Group, whose past projects include Mark Wahlberg's Oceanside flagship and Kingfisher in Golden Hill. Preliminary sketches shown to the Association's Art Jury include a reimagined entrance, an open room built around a central bar, an expanded patio, a wine lounge, and a card room. This is not a facelift. It is a full reinvention of the Club's social core, and it moved from concept to approved budget without a member-wide vote, because the board determined the law did not require one.
That decision drew pointed pushback at the time. One resident, Holly Manion, put it plainly during the board's discussion: "We are a homeowner's association, not a restaurant." Her point was not about the design. It was about process, and it is the same question now attached to the fitness center and spa: preliminary design conversations are already underway, despite the concept landing in the middle of the pack when members were surveyed in 2022, and despite no open-meeting agenda item putting it before the community first.
Set that pace against Osuna Ranch. The property's adobe home dates to the 1830s and was restored in 1924 and 1925 by Lilian Rice, the same architect who laid out the Covenant's winding streets and shaped its overall character. The adobe was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2017. The Association bought the ranch in 2006 specifically to preserve it, and today it still functions as a working equestrian property, boarding roughly fifty horses, with priority given to Covenant residents.
The nonprofit Amigos de Osuna has spent years advocating for the site's preservation, and each summer the Association opens the grounds for Celebrate Osuna, a community festival with pony rides, lasso lessons, wine tastings, and self-guided tours of the adobe itself. None of that changes this month. What does change is the timeline. For the first time since the Association took ownership, there is an actual target: County discussions on modifying the site's Major Use Permit are set to begin in fall 2026, with completion envisioned for late 2028. Two decades of "planning continues" now has an end date attached to it, even if that date is still two years out.
The "Centennial" that made this year's strategic planning list is easy to confuse with a milestone the community already marked. In 2024, the Rancho Santa Fe Historical Society celebrated the hundredth anniversary of La Flecha House, the small building at the center of the Village that houses the community's museum and serves as its informal visitor center. That celebration is behind us.
The Centennial the Association just added to its own planning list is a different one: the approaching hundredth anniversary of the Covenant itself. It is still ahead, and formal planning for it is only now getting underway alongside everything else on the August 13 list. If you have heard "Rancho Santa Fe's Centennial" mentioned twice this year and assumed it was the same event both times, it was not.
Most of what came out of the Rancho Valencia meeting is still conceptual. Here is where each piece actually stands as of this month:
| Project | Status as of August 2026 | What's next |
|---|---|---|
| Ranch Clubhouse restaurant | Closed for its approved $8 million renovation | Members use the Snack Bar in the interim; reopening plans include a new bar, wine lounge, and card room |
| Fitness center & spa | Preliminary sketches shown to the Art Jury | No open vote required to proceed; no construction timeline set |
| Osuna Ranch | Operating as usual, boarding roughly 50 horses | County permitting conversations targeted for fall 2026, completion envisioned late 2028 |
| Village center median | Idea stage | No design or budget attached yet |
For residents, that means the trails you ride today, the Snack Bar you are using while the Clubhouse is closed, and Osuna Ranch's boarding operation are not going anywhere in the near term. It also means a genuinely new amenity, the fitness center and spa, could clear design and budget stages faster than a two-hundred-year-old adobe clears a county permitting process, simply because one required a formal vote and the other, so far, has not.
The pattern is the real story here. The newest ideas move at the speed of a design meeting. The property with the most history behind it needed nearly twenty years just to get a date on the calendar. Whether that is a fair allocation of attention is a conversation the Association's own members are already having. Knowing which is which, before you assume otherwise, is the more useful takeaway for anyone who calls the Covenant home.
For homeowners weighing their own next chapter here, keeping track of which projects are real and which are still concepts is part of knowing the community you live in, not just the market. Adriana Prieto follows Rancho Santa Fe's governance, trails, and Village changes as closely as its listings. Schedule a free consultation anytime you want to talk through what any of this means for your property.
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