Northville Hills Golf Club

The course

The eighteen-hole course was designed by Arnold Palmer and has been ranked among the top ten courses in southeast Michigan by Crain's Detroit Business. It is a public course, open to anyone booking a tee time rather than restricted to residents or members. It plays through wide fairways and large greens, with a number of holes lined with mature trees, and it is the organizing element the whole neighborhood was drawn around rather than an amenity added beside it.

That distinction matters when reading the market here. In a community planned around a course, the lots that front it were priced differently from the beginning and continue to trade differently. A house backing a fairway, a house with a partial view, and a house on an interior street are three different products, and the difference does not show up in a bedroom count.

The homes

Construction ran from 2001 to 2015, which is a fifteen-year span and long enough that the neighborhood contains several distinct building generations. Toll Brothers built the majority, with additional builders contributing, so plan libraries and elevations vary across the community rather than repeating from a single catalog. Sizes generally fall between 3,000 and 6,000 square feet, which puts these houses well above the median for the area.

The practical consequence of that fifteen-year build is that an early house and a late house differ in more than finish. Mechanical systems, window packages, insulation standards, and kitchen and bath layouts all moved over that period. A 2002 house is now well over twenty years old and is reaching the age where roofs, furnaces, and air conditioning come due; a 2014 house is a substantially different proposition. Both are Northville Hills.

The Villas at Northville Hills is the attached-housing component of the community, with its own association and its own economics. Buyers looking at the Villas should treat them as a separate market from the single-family houses rather than as a smaller version of the same thing.

The club and the amenities

Residents have access to a private fitness and swim club built around a 25-meter pool. Beyond that there are tennis courts, playgrounds, and a network of walking trails through the community. Golf membership and club access arrangements are worth confirming specifically — how they work, what they cost, and what is included with a home purchase versus purchased separately is exactly the sort of thing that varies and that buyers assume rather than verify.

That verification matters more here than in most neighborhoods, because the amenity package is a substantial part of what a buyer is paying for. Establish the association structure, the dues, what those dues cover, and what any golf or club membership requires on top of them, before the offer rather than after.

Where it sits

The community lies in the eastern part of Northville Township, near Six Mile Road and Sheldon. I-275 is close to the east and M-14 runs just south, which puts Ann Arbor roughly half an hour west and downtown Detroit about thirty-five minutes east, with Detroit Metro Airport around twenty-five minutes southeast.

Downtown Northville and its historic district sit a short drive northwest, and Maybury State Park anchors the township's western side with several hundred acres of trails. The township as a whole carries most of Northville's newer housing, and this community is among the larger single developments in it.

The township around it

Northville Township is younger than the town it takes its name from. The village of Northville grew up inside Plymouth Township from the 1820s, and it was not until 1898 that residents here split off to form a township of their own — carving Northville Township out of what had been a Plymouth "supertownship" that also contained present-day Canton. It became a charter township in 1985. The City of Northville, incorporated as a home rule city in 1955, sits adjacent to the township's northern side and is administratively separate from it.

The township is where the growth went. Its population stood at 12,987 in 1980, reached 17,313 by 1990 and 21,036 by 2000, and was 31,758 at the 2020 census. Northville Hills is a direct product of that curve — built during the 2000s and early 2010s, on ground that had been open not long before.

Legacy Park and Maybury

Two large public spaces sit within easy reach, and both have unusual histories. Legacy Park occupies the 350 acres on Seven Mile Road that were once the Northville Psychiatric Hospital — a facility that opened in 1952, closed in 2003, and was demolished in stages, its nine-story tower coming down in 2018 and the last buildings in 2023. The township acquired the property in 2009 and began developing the park in phases from 2023. It now carries more than ten miles of hiking trails and six miles of mountain-biking track, and it was named 2025 Project of the Year by the Michigan chapter of the American Public Works Association.

Maybury State Park covers 944 acres on the township's western side. That ground was the William H. Maybury Sanatorium, a tuberculosis hospital that operated from 1921 to 1969 on eight farms Detroit bought for the purpose — at its peak a self-contained community of more than forty buildings with its own farm supplying milk and produce. The state took over the property in 1971 and it became a state park in 1975. It now holds an extensive unpaved trail network for hikers, cyclists, and horseback riders, plus a four-mile paved path, and the Northville Community Foundation runs an 80-acre farm next door that continues the original one's function.

Schools

Northville Hills Golf Club is served by Northville Public Schools. Parts of Northville Township fall into Plymouth-Canton Community Schools instead, and the Wayne–Oakland county line runs through the wider Northville area.

Buying or selling in Northville Hills

Comparable sales here need three things matched, not one. First, the lot's relationship to the course — fairway frontage, partial view, or interior street. Second, the build year, because a fifteen-year span covers real differences in construction and in what has since come due. Third, the builder, since Toll Brothers built most but not all of it and the plan libraries differ. A community-wide average applied to a specific address will be wrong in one direction or another almost every time.

For buyers, the diligence splits along the same line as the build years. On the earlier houses, run the full systems review — roof, furnace, air conditioning, water heater, windows — because twenty-plus-year-old components are at or past their expected life. On the later houses, the focus shifts to workmanship and drainage rather than age. Across all of them, get clear on the association and club structure in writing: dues, what they cover, golf and fitness access, and any transfer requirements at closing.

For sellers, the amenity package and the course are the case, and they should be made specifically rather than gestured at. An Arnold Palmer course ranked in the region's top ten, a private 25-meter pool and fitness club, tennis, trails, and a house well above the local median size is a combination that reaches a particular buyer — often one relocating into the area who is comparing whole communities rather than individual houses. Presenting the community as clearly as the house is what wins that buyer, and on the older houses, documenting what has already been replaced removes the objection most likely to cost you money.