As you pass Caves Road on the drive along Park Heights Avenue, the roadway gradually comes under a canopy of tall, stately, windswept trees, creating a tunnel-like appearance.

On each side, there are rolling acres of green. And then in a moment, on the right side, the golf club appears, and you strain to catch a glimpse of a green or fairway.

In the quiet starkness of winter, you can spy the stately clubhouse in the distance. But now, the Caves Valley Golf Club is mostly shielded by shrubbery and trees in full bloom.

On most June evenings, the atmosphere around the club would be slumbering. Not so this night.

The service-entrance gate is open as workers continue to prep and erect white tents. A roadside sign points the way to where volunteers should gather for training.

Farther along on Park Heights, identified here as Route 129, on the left-hand side an open field is being used as a parking lot. And across the street, the guard at the gated entrance to the club is surely seeing more vehicles come and go than at any other time on his watch.

The calmness of Caves Valley has been replaced with anticipation as it gets ready for the national spotlight - and an anticipated 150,000 visitors to this week's U.S. Senior Open golf tournament.

In the next few days, as publicity builds to a crescendo about the glory, magnificence and majesty of this course that opened for play in 1991, nary a word will be spoken by officials about the other aspect of Caves Valley - its residences.

Set among the 962 acres is the Tom Fazio-designed championship course, and along the two roads - John Carroll and Blendon - that provide access to the club are 34 home sites. Of those sites, 16 have become the setting for some of Baltimore's most exclusive million-dollar homes.

However, if visitors following the likes of Jack Nicklaus and Arnold Palmer expect to see these homes flanking the greens and tees, they'll be disappointed.

Caves Valley is not a golf course community in the traditional sense, where owners can sit on their patios, sip scotch, smoke a cigar and watch the foursomes play through. It is first and foremost a golf club dedicated to the tradition of the game - with aspirations to be held one day in the same light as Georgia's Augusta National, site of the Masters. The residences, mostly set back by wooded buffers, play a secondary role.

As much as Caves Valley Golf Club officials will boast about the course and its amenities, when it comes to commenting on the history and philosophy of building and living at Caves Valley, they politely decline, mentioning the privacy of its residents, most of whom are successful lawyers, entrepreneurs and corporate and sports figures.

In addition, residents contacted declined to be interviewed.

However, several architects, builders, developers and real estate agents who have seen the residential aspect of Caves Valley grow from its stumbling start, when it had trouble selling lots in the early 1990s, to today's grand setting agree that the discipline of design has made this community one of the most elite in Baltimore, if not Maryland.

'One spectacular job'

"It is probably the finest living situation that you can find in the general area," said Tim Rodgers, president of Hill & Co., whose Cross Keys firm deals primarily in luxury properties. "The views are spectacular. The security. The architecture, through and through. They have done one spectacular job. They didn't miss a trick - from burying the power lines to the landscaping, everything."

What seems to set Caves Valley apart from other high-end Baltimore communities is its enforcement of what it believes the community design should represent. And that means the residences are not to be an intrusion on but rather an extension and reflection of the golf course.

"It is understated elegance," said Delbert Adams, owner of Ilex Construction and Development Inc., who oversaw the renovation of the Caves Valley clubhouse.

Homes-course relation

Said Jay Brown, a local architect who has designed almost half of the Caves Valley homes: "The relationship of the homes to the golf course is really the principle issue here.

"These houses are not on the golf course. There is vegetative separation. There is physical separation. There is graphic separation. Everything they can do to preserve the golf course in its natural environment has been a goal of the club. As designers, it has been our role to assist the design review committee in ensuring that that it happens.

"Stylistically, too, these homes have less variety than some other golf course communities where you could have French homes, English homes, anonymously styled residences. Here, they are trying to preserve a single style of architecture ... not only in terms of the style but also the materials and the colors in the materials."

Jeffrey A. Penza, an architect working on his third Caves Valley home and conducting renovations on another, said as soon as an architect understands the desires of Caves Valley's determined architectural design committee, the chances for misunderstandings decline.

"They are concerned about everything from light fixtures to colors and materials and landscaping," Penza said. "We put our best judgment forward, and they tell us whether our judgment is good or not. But after you've done it once, you've got a kind of feel for where they are going with things."

Sometimes, though, there is a clash of styles between what a client wants and what Caves will allow.

"The first two that we did, the process went pretty smoothly," Penza sad. "The last one that we did, we were pushing the envelope a little bit in that the client was interested in doing something a little bit more contemporary.

"Defining that fine line between contemporary and Caves, I found it fun, but it was definitely a little bit more of a struggle, as opposed to the first two houses, which I think were very much in line with what Caves was interested in."

Change in philosophy

The original design philosophy of Caves Valley was for the homes to be quaint cottages. Figuring that the homes would be the principal residences for wealthy, corporate empty-nesters, Caves officials thought they would be small, approximately 3,000 square feet.

But what happened was that the clients began demanding larger homes - anywhere from 5,000 to 10,000 square feet. These were people who not only sought Caves Valley as a corporate getaway but also wanted to use the residences for charity work, entertaining and to play host to large family gatherings.

Although the houses - on lots of 1 1/2 to 3 1/2 acres - grew in size, the architectural design committee, which is made up of residents and club officials, clamped down on what could be built. There would be no gauche, egotistic McMansions.

"[Committee members] don't care if you build there or not," said Paul Lichter of J. Paul Builders, whose work on a Caves Valley home won an award this year from the Home Builders Association of Maryland. "They just want you to conform to their standards of the design. They are really hard on the architects, mostly. They want the houses to look a certain way."

Brown said that certain way is "a Maryland historical style ... a brick, colonialist, clapboard" look. Penza characterized his first Caves Valley home as "Tidewater" architecture.

"You see a little bit more of it on the Eastern Shore," Penza said. "A lot of the style really comes down to the roof lines, the way dormers are handled and those type of things. It's tough to put into lay terms."

Some homes are brick or stucco, but the majority incorporate stone from the local Butler quarry.

"They are very interested in using natural materials, slate and cedar run roofs, no fiberglass shingles," said Penza, who added that he has also done a copper roof. "It's all an emphasis on using very high-quality natural materials."

The windows have expensive fixed-grille patterns, unlike production houses where the grilles can be removed from the glass. The landscaping carries over from the golf course, with lawns perfectly groomed and shrubbery that helps the residences blend into the setting.

"These houses are just to die for," Brown said. "If you go in, they are so beautiful and refined. The quantity of landscaping that they have here is mandated to some extent by Caves, and it is all maintained by Caves. So they require you to put a certain amount of landscaping in, and then they take care of it for you. So, everything outside of the house - sprinkler, grass - is all taken care of by Caves."

As for customized interior amenities, leave it to one's imagination.

There are houses with sophisticated lighting systems.

There are homes with heated floors.

And there are the homes with dedicated theaters, one reportedly with seating that might remind people of the old Mini-Flick in Pikesville.

"When you go in houses, you can feel the quality the minute you walk through the door," Lichter said. "Not only are you getting a well-built house with good quality, you are getting good architecture, good landscape design. It's the best that Baltimore does have to offer."

It doesn't stop there.

"The icing on the cake there is the very high quality of their restaurant/club facility and the catering that almost makes their entire community concierge level," said Karen Hubble Bisbee, an agent with the Greenspring office of Coldwell Banker Residential Brokerage. "It's like being in a fancy hotel with room service. It is first-class treatment."

Said Harriett Wasserman, a top producing agent with Prudential Carruthers Realtors in Pikesville, who is listing a 3,018-square-foot rancher on Blendon Road for $1.5 million: "If you want lunch, you just call up [the clubhouse restaurant], and they deliver it to you.

"They have maid service ... every amenity you can imagine."

But that service comes with a price. The homeowner association dues, according to Wasserman's listing, are $4,500 annually.

The process

Nobody can just come into Caves and put up the house of his dreams - far from it. All of the remaining 18 lots in Caves are privately owned, but if you want to build, you must apply and be approved as a member. There are two kinds of memberships: social and golf, both of which cost thousands of dollars in membership fees.

Once approved, it's time to start the planning process with the architectural review committee.

"Before you buy at Caves, I think they try to really communicate to everybody who is buying that these are what our expectations are," Penza said.

Essentially, this is what a client is in for.

First, you meet with the design review committee. It is the only time the client is allowed to join the architect in front of the committee. The committee presents the guidelines and the process. The remaining meetings are between the architect and the committee.

Then the architect prepares a schematic design, which is a site plan that shows the house on the lot, the perspective, the general location and the quantity of landscaping on the lot, as well as the floor plan of the house and the exterior elevations of the house.

Then that design is reviewed by the committee.

The architect takes the comments from the design review committee and addresses them. That can mean starting over or making minor revisions.

Then new drawings are submitted.

The plans are either rejected or approved, but the final OK could be contingent upon selection of exterior colors or exterior light fixtures and their locations on the house or the final identification of certain landscape material.

Upon approval, the opportunity to clear the lot is given.

Far from finished

But wait, there's more.

Not only does the committee want to read what materials are going to be used, it wants to see them. A "sample panel" with all the materials and colors to be used is required and built so that the committee can see how the stone, slate, brick or cedar and house colors will work together. The sample panel must then be approved.

The attention to detail and supervision doesn't stop with the architect; it extends to the builder as well.

"At Caves Valley, they are there policing the activity of builders," Lichter said. "It's a golf course community, so the streets must be kept clean all the time. No signage is allowed, so I can't post my [company] sign on the community. So, it's like I'm just there doing my job and getting out."

Lichter said he understands the mentality. "They are trying to look out for the golfers and the community residents," he said.

"At Caves Valley, there is a management team on staff to make sure everything is going right, where at other communities that doesn't exist because the developers don't want to put out the money for that," added Lichter, who during the past 20 years has built in such high-profile communities as Bridle Ridge, Laurelford and Hillstead in Baltimore County.

Many of those who have worked in Caves Valley as well as other upscale communities can't help but compare and contrast.

"You go to a place like Bridle Ridge, St. Timothy's, you drive through there, those lots are more expensive than some of these lots," Brown said. "You've got the French cottage. You've got a contemporary. The mix is enormous, and the restrictive covenants are - by and large - identical. They speak the same language, but the oversight by the committee isn't there like it is here."

Not everyone's choice

That might be true, said Steve Smith of Gaylord Brooks Realty Co. Inc., developer of Bridle Ridge, where lots are reselling from $400,000 to $450,000. However, he added, the Bridle Ridge design committee "doesn't want to push somebody into a very narrow slot as far as what they can and can't build.

"We don't want to look too homogenized," said Smith, who noted that the end result for Caves Valley will be "something that is certainly very distinct and very nice.

"I don't know if we will achieve that in Bridle Ridge. But it is difficult to achieve that. At this point, [you're] building a planned community that is planned down to the color of your shutters, and there are a lot of people in the world that aren't interested in going through that process ... not to mention the expense."

The perception that Caves Valley will be too homogenized is not true, according to Ilex's Adams.

"If you look at those houses, you will see a diversification in such a way that the architects have had the ability to express themselves differently. You don't see a bunch of cookie-cutter big houses there," Adams said. "I think the standards that they have developed and maintained are standards that give you a range.

"I think that most architects should be able to be expressive. I think those homes tell you that. There is a flavor in there. I don't think it handcuffs the architect. It may push them a little bit to work within some parameters, but I think any good architect can deal with that. I think anyone moving in that area would like to have those similar controls to protect their investment."

Said Penza: "Everything about Caves is about quality. Period. Whether it is the golfing experience. Whether it is the dining experience. Whether it's building a house there. It is all about quality. Period."