In Chicagoland:
Exmoor, Highland Park. It's over 100 years old, has a thriving membership and nobody seems to brag it up. I liked pretty much every hole out there. Prichard did a thoughtful restoration of a Ross design, which is reminiscent of both Skokie and Beverly, each of which gets a lot more chatter than Exmoor.
Edgewood Valley, LaGrange. It's another old course (a Bill Diddel design), on a big piece of rolling property, with thousands of mature oak and hickory trees. The greens are quite simply maniacal. A few of the holes are either goofy or blase, but overall, the course is a real gem and nobody talks about it.
Sunset Ridge, Northmoor. Sunset is another Bill Diddel layout. It suffers from one very correctible infirmity: a couple thousand trees that ought to be cut down. Great green complexes, tough short holes and good par 4's. An excellent members' kind of course, but one that has a lot of architectural bones that are hard to see because of the tree issue. The course probably has 600 pine trees on it, which is a desecration in our area. Cut down the right trees and leave the ones that don't get in the way and you have a much better golf course.