On a breezy Thursday evening, a group of San Francisco biohackers, futurists, influencers and techies gathered in a dim converted restaurant about a block from the waterfront for a live energy healing. The guests chatted quietly over goji berry health tonics and sushi rolls during the featured event, a demonstration of the potential of human-generated bioelectricity to solve chronic pain.
The venue was Modernist, a membership club at the edge of the city’s Financial District that opened a decade ago with a core group of about 100 “founders, investors and innovators" from San Francisco's tech industry. That core group was made up of people “who did very well, either in venture or starting companies, who wanted to come together and have our own permanent community," cofounder Albert Chen told CoStar News.
“Really, we wanted our own little 'Cheers.'"
When the club opened in 2015, private social clubs for the young and hip were still something of a novelty in this coastal city that once brought the world the Summer of Love. But San Francisco these days is more about tech incubators than tie-dye. The city is one of many across the country in recent years where members-only clubs have flourished as "third spaces" where folks can gather with others who share their politics, social status or worldview, depending on the club.
Though private clubs date back centuries, the past decade has witnessed a surge nationwide and around the world in members-only social venues, said Peter Cole, cofounder and CEO of the Collectio Group, a New York consultancy that tracks the sector. The rise of the 21st-century members-only club has followed declining participation in traditional religious and civic groups that once provided a sense of community, from churches to PTAs.
The COVID-19 pandemic supercharged a sense of isolation in the digital age that has sparked the growth of clubs not only in major coastal markets like New York and Miami but also in smaller cities like Salt Lake City and Dallas, Cole said. These newer venues tend to be organized around an idea or a vibe rather than a sport like golf or sailing or where its members went to college.
"Consumers are looking to fill a need they have for belonging,” Cole said. "Those clubs that are done well focus on building a community rather than just being an Instagram-able space."
Isolation cure
Depending on whom you ask, the new wave of private clubs that blossomed in San Francisco alongside the second dot-com boom in the 2010s was either an effort to bring like-minded people together or a symptom of growing wealth and class disparity in one of the nation’s least affordable cities.
Chen concedes that he is "very picky" about the membership at Modernist. He likes to say that club members must be "fun, friendly, accomplished, interesting, respectful and not pretentious.”
Like other club entrepreneurs, he connects the rise of clubs in recent years to the isolation of the digital era. The number of high-end members' clubs in the United States has surged 66% over the past decade to 150 last year, according to industry consultancy Pipeline Agency. That figure doesn't include mid-tier or more affordable social clubs.
Chen notes that while the idea of people feeling isolated in 2025 has become a cliché, at some point in the past few years, San Francisco stopped being a fun place to go out at night. After the COVID-19 pandemic, “something got lost,” Chen said. “People just started staying home for days at a time. It’s become a recipe for disaster.”
Chen and his business partner, Steve Chen — no relation — who became friends at the University of California at Berkeley, started the club in an effort to "increase random interactions" among people with common interests and values. Modernist holds TED Talk-like events that encourage discussion about topics such as the longevity movement and the latest advances in artificial intelligence, basically, "how the world is changing right now," Albert Chen said.
Modernist, like other San Francisco social clubs, stresses that it has plenty of members who are not in tech. "We have ballerinas and people who are in finance," Chen said — though, like the Amador and other modern private social clubs, it is a reflection of a certain milieu, which in this city is about 70% techies.
Former tech executive Evan Krow, who now runs San Francisco's Amador Club, said the rise of private clubs in San Francisco in the past decade was about finding a refuge from the industry and the way it has transformed the way people socialize.
"I think it was about getting away from tech," he said. Many clubs have "no screens" rules — or provide special booths for phone use. And clubs have gone out of their way to try to diversify their memberships.
'Let's hang out'
This summer, Krow is opening a club on the ground floor of the Bank of Italy building that will be aptly named the Bank at Amador club. Both the club and the older Amador club upstairs are named in tribute to the bank's founder, Amadeo Pietro Giannini, who is considered the father of modern consumer banking.
In 1908, Giannini oversaw the construction of the bank with a radical goal: serving working people, immigrants and even women. The eight-story Renaissance Revival bank on Montgomery Street had gilded white marble walls inlaid with cabochon stones, soaring ceilings, and at the center of it all, what was said to be the largest vault west of Chicago. It aimed to convey an image of wealth and permanence to ordinary people used to keeping their money in mattresses.
The new club plans to serve craft cocktails and oysters on the half shell, promising "modern luxury and a state-of-the-art audio technology for the ultimate club experience."
The club now called the Amador opened in 2012 as Wingtip — a reference to the classic men’s dress shoe. With cigar lockers and stuffed animal heads on the walls, its old-school masculine vibe is reflected in its mostly male membership.
Krow hopes the new Bank at Amador club brings in a more diverse clientele. To that end, the new club will cost just $50 a month — compared to $250 a month at the Amador Club upstairs.
He acknowledged that channeling an inclusive vibe is tricky for a business model that is, by definition, exclusive. But Krow said his clubs are part of a new generation of members-only social clubs that are more about seeking community than telegraphing wealth and status.
“We have members who are lawyers and doctors and tech people, and we also have firemen and policemen,” he said. “Our thing is, if you’re good, and you’re cool, then let’s hang out.”
Krow and others in this growing entertainment niche say today’s young urban professionals might be turned off by the idea of an old boys' club, but many of them are desperate for a place to socialize in spaces more distinctive than a bar or their apartment. Today’s members’ clubs often offer extras and activities from classes on meditation to whiskey tastings on top of more traditional benefits like networking.
Social club equity
Club entrepreneur Nate Bourg, a founder of The Academy in San Francisco's storied Castro District, said a central part of the club experience for many people is being in an elegant space with other accomplished folks.
“I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that, to want a unique experience because you feel like you’ve earned it,” he said.
On the other hand, San Francisco in 2025 is full of exhausted, lonely people in need of an escape from their screens in a place with other like-minded folks, said Bourg. The Academy, opened in 2017, claims to be the world’s first and only LGBTQ+ private social club.
Still, Bourg and his partners are conscious of projecting an accessible image for an audience that values diversity. To accommodate those not able to afford its monthly fees of around $200 for a mid-tier membership, The Academy opens up some activities — from wine tastings to board game nights — to nonmembers and offers volunteer opportunities and tiered plans.
“You don’t have to have a bunch of money or a certain social standing to come here,” he said.
Quiet luxury
If this class of wired creatives has a home, it's Jackson Square in San Francisco, a tree-lined historic micro-district that’s become synonymous with understated but serious wealth.
In addition to the Amador, the Bank at Amador and the Battery, Jackson Square is home to the elegant Italian supper club Villa Taverna, an invite-only fine dining club that dates back to the late 1950s and became a favorite of luminaries like the Getty family and the late Sen. Dianne Feinstein. In 2023, a nationwide networking group for female C-suite executives called Chief opened a clubhouse on Montgomery Street.
But nothing in the neighborhood came close to approaching the ultra-luxe Core Club, which said it was targeting a clientele of “world builders, change-makers, visionaries and agents of transformation.” This potential membership might not balk at the club’s initiation fees of up to $100,000 followed by $15,000 to $18,000 per year.
The New York-based venue announced in 2021 that it had picked San Francisco as the “internationally relevant and culturally vibrant” site of its third club, after Manhattan and Milan. The club was set to open in 2023 on the bottom three floors of the New York developer Michael Shvo’s newly renovated Transamerica Pyramid at 600 Montgomery St. with three private restaurants and bars, a fitness center, a theater, six members’ suites and four private meeting rooms.
Those plans got derailed last year when Core’s owners, Jennie and Dangene Enterprise, filed a $600 million lawsuit in New York State Supreme Court that accused Shvo of fraud and running an $80,000 tab at the Core club in New York and refusing to tip the staff, among other things. Shvo responded by countersuing, arguing the founders were “cash-strapped” and had launched a “public hit job” on him as a ploy to get out of the deal.
The word in San Francisco's club scene was that the owners realized that there would be few takers for such a club in this city, which still has mixed feelings about elite private membership venues even as it embraces more of them.
In 2023, some businessmen floated a plan to open a private membership club in an early-20th-century vacant bank in the wealthy hamlet of Mill Valley, just north of the Golden Gate Bridge. Pitching it as a "simple community gathering place," the planners promised to set aside needs-based discount memberships for would-be members who couldn't afford the dues.
But in the end, the club plan died in the wake of fierce community opposition.
“A private membership club is exclusionary and is not how we view ourselves in Mill Valley," said then-Mayor Urban Carmel.