The Battery

The Battery is a private members' club at 717 Battery Street in San Francisco, opened in 2013 by Michael and Xochi Birch. The building runs from a lower-level workspace and wine cellar up through a restaurant, living room, garden and several bars to a library, study, guest suites and a penthouse with terrace, and includes a fourteen-suite hotel whose guests stay as Resident Members with access to club amenities. The club's published Charter sets out its membership classes: Full Members, Lifetime Members, a Hosting Privileges subclass that lets named guests visit in the member's absence, Couples Lifetime memberships issued as two independent memberships, Resident Members, Reciprocal Members and Artists or Creatives in Residence. On the application side the club advertises four types: Member, Partner for a member's spouse or partner, Out of Town for those without a home within a hundred-mile drive, and Under 30. An optional upgrade, The Battery Alliance, adds access to more than seventy private clubs in twenty-three countries. Battery Powered, the club's collective giving programme, pools member funding behind a seasonal social or environmental theme.

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The club describes admission in four steps: an online application, a nomination, an open house at the club where the applicant meets members and staff, and approval. Members use the clubhouse daily, may bring up to three guests at a time, and are asked to keep phones away in public areas and not to photograph or tag people. Members and their guests can stay in the hotel suites as Resident Members. Battery Powered runs in seasons, each spotlighting a social or environmental challenge, with members hearing from experts and then funding selected organisations collectively.

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The club publishes no occupational or wealth criteria. Its own materials emphasise conversation, cultural programming and collective giving through Battery Powered rather than industry or seniority.

The Battery is the most explicitly civic of the clubs in this group: Battery Powered turns membership into a pooled giving vehicle with a published theme each season, which is a materially different proposition from a club that simply sells access to rooms. It is also the most process-transparent on admission and the least transparent on money. The club publishes a full Charter with membership classes, guest rules and room-by-room access rights, but no initiation fee or dues figure appears anywhere on its site, and no reliable published figure was found. The Lifetime and Couples Lifetime classes imply a large one-off payment that is never quantified publicly. Prospective members should also note that a nomination is part of the published route in, so the club is not open to cold application in practice.

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