Sometimes, when you’re planning a much-needed getaway, you have to make a tough choice. Should you search for a destination that offers the kind of great golf challenges you crave? Or should you focus on finding a resort that offers the full menu of spa experiences you need to enhance your wellbeing and peace of mind? Luckily, you don’t have to make that choice. Here are four luxury resorts to consider. They’re located in destinations as diverse as Mexico, California, Pennsylvania and Georgia—and each one offers the best of both worlds, great golf and an amazing spa.

Nemacolin
Farmington, Pennsylvania

Luxury resort – Nemacolin Woodlands – Photography by Evan Schiller

About an hour south of Pittsburgh, nestled in the Alleghany Mountains, is one of the great resorts in America. Featuring two fantastic golf courses—Mystic Rock and Shepherd’s Rock—Nemacolin is a suite of luxurious standards and surprises. The golf was the initial star of the resort with Mystic Rock, a Pete Dye-design hosting the PGA Tour’s 84 Lumber Classic in the mid-aughts for three years. Shepherd’s Rock opened in 2017 and both courses take advantage of the mountainous terrain. The more challenging shots on each course require uphill approaches and then offer downhill tee shots that sail high over the mountains and take advantage of long-range views.

The resort recently completed an extensive transformation that included upgrades to the 56 suites at The Grand Lodge and a redesign of the grand lobby featuring a stunning split staircase. Upgraded dining options include the opening of the highly anticipated Fawn & Fable, offering steakhouse fare prepared with locally-sourced ingredients and the resort’s famed Lautrec, which serves a sumptuous six-course tasting menu.

The Woodlands Spa is a blissful affair, featuring a variety of wellness offerings including massages, skin and body treatments and signature therapies such as the Five Elements Journey. The spa also offers a seasonal Golf Wellness Package designed to help players achieve optimum improvement. The resort’s Holistic Healing Center promises an innovative, personalized approach to life balance and integrated wellness.

Nemacolin.com

Sensei Porcupine Creek
Rancho Mirage, California

Set within the foothills of the Santa Rosa Mountains near Palm Springs, California, Sensei Porcupine Creek is a desert oasis where wellbeing has been prioritized and it also includes an outstanding golf course. The resort is a former private estate and therefore its golf course sits on a tidy 75 acres and isn’t a sprawling affair. Unlike other resorts that try to maximize time and golfers on the course to increase revenue, at Sensei the tee times are well-spaced, so golfers never feel rushed. And, unlike other resorts, guests may play as singles, using golfing as a solitary chance to meditate and take in their natural surroundings. This is a reflection of how the resort prioritizes its guests’ well-being and seeks to help them find their center.

Another indication of this focus is the opportunity for guests to have one-on-one sessions in yoga, fitness, meditation and nutrition while visiting the resort. In some instances, they can even add biomarkers to their therapy to help them understand their heart rate variability (HRV) and find their VO2 Max, a measure of their lungs’ efficiency. Visitors to the spa can choose from a menu of relaxing massages, customized bodywork and rejuvenating facials. Sensei’s specialized treatments are novel and also worth trying, including thermal body mapping where a proprietary technology points out asymmetries and tight muscles and areas of pain. The resort’s lagoon-style pool offers guests an idyllic setting to escape the desert heat surrounded by the beautifully designed landscape.

Sensei.com

Costa Palmas Golf Club
East Cape, Los Cabos, Mexico

The Costa Palmas Golf Club showcases a world-class championship golf course and offers desert, marina and ocean views amid dunescapes and fairways that unravel down hillsides. The course takes full advantage of incorporating the natural beauty of Baja’s East Cape and offers a pleasant, walkable 18-hole links-style coastal course. One of the best things about the course is that it offers golfers a chance to play a traditional 18 holes or to break them into shorter six-hole loops for faster play or if the ocean is calling. Costa Palmas is attached to the Four Seasons Resort Los Cabos at Costa Palmas, where its spa and private residences are also located. (An Aman resort and residences is currently under construction.)

For those who want a little more out of their spa experience, two deluxe spa suites, Agua Serena and Agua Dorada, offer the ultimate spa day with a loved one. Each spa suite includes an expansive indoor treatment room, outdoor relaxation space and private plunge pool. Before embarking on the spa, guests can set up appointments with the adventure team for an opportunity to commune with nature. Sailing, snorkeling and hiking are all there for their pleasure. For dining, Michelin-Starred Chef Ludo Lefebvre debuted Delphine this year, featuring laid-back but refined French cuisine. And Nancy Silverton’s Mozza Baja offers a Mexican East Cape take on her Italian fare. Costa Palmas also boasts Los Cabos’ only superyacht marina as well as luxury private villas, and for those seeking nightlife, there’s Chiki, a seductively psychedelic private nightclub designed by Martin Brudnizki Design Studio.

Costapalmas.com

Cloudland at McLemore Resort
Rising Fawn, Georgia

Just outside Chattanooga, Tennessee, an oasis has been built in the sky. McLemore looms large on a plateau among the Smoky Mountains and features two golf courses in the air. The resort’s newest course, The Keep, weaves atop the mountain forest with gentle, flat land and 1.5 miles of clifftop edge, offering spectacular views of the surrounding mountain range. Another feature of the property is the five streams that converge into a single source, creating waterfalls along the way. Its older brother, the Highlands Course, offers similar mountain terrain, pushing up to cliffs’ edges on several holes, creating heart-pumping excitement for golfers tackling the course and featuring one of the most distinctive finishing holes in the Southeast.

And while golf is a key driver to the resort, the opening of the hotel makes a definite statement that their clientele extends beyond avid golfers. Its spa, named Selah, provides guests with an indoor retreat, as well. It offers a full menu of spa experiences, including massages, facials and body treatments. One example is the hydrotherapy lounge that offers thermotherapy, a three-step relaxation ritual that alternates between hot and cold temperatures followed by a period of rest. The treatment is designed to stimulate circulation, relieve pain, decrease stress and rejuvenate the body.

Sitting at 2,300 feet above sea level, McLemore is ready to establish itself as one of the more preeminent and unique luxury destinations in the South.

Themclemore.com

For more luxury resorts check out our Spa & Resorts section here!

The post Best of Both Worlds appeared first on JetsetMag.com.

Pinehurst’s past inspires its present

Few sports revere their own history like golf. The sport, despite an onslaught of technological improvements to equipment, athletic clothing, and a slickly made Netflix series showing the sport’s luxury-loving superstars, still seems to evoke both within and without a sense of being old-fashioned. Maybe that image persists because so much of the game in this country takes place behind the closed gates of country clubs, but golf, especially with an influx of new players post-Covid, has been changing for some time. One of the best-case studies for that change is America’s first golf resort, Pinehurst.

Located in the Sandhills region of North Carolina about an hour south of the state capitol, Raleigh, Pinehurst has been hosting golfers since 1895 and this year it will host its fourth U.S. Open after being named an “anchor site” by the United States Golf Association. This means the championship will return to the resort’s most famous course, simply named No. 2, four more times between now and 2047. The last time the resort hosted the championship was in 2014, when it held both the men’s and women’s U.S. Open in back-to-back weeks, revealing a restoration to No. 2 where more than 40 acres of sod had been removed to return the course to a more rugged and natural look, in line with its appearance through the 1920s and 1950s.

No. 2 has always been the resort’s main draw despite having nine courses in its roster—and a tenth slated to open this April—for legions of golfers over the years who wanted to test their games, but the 2014 championships helped show casual golf fans used to seeing the teeming green of their home courses or Augusta National Golf Club each April, a different look—and a different way—to play golf. That looked involved not lush fairways and brightly-lit greens that glowed on the screen but a course that showcased a return to old-school centerline irrigation with fairways brown and crispy at their edges, punished by the hot North Carolina summer. Furthermore, wide expanses of sand, spotted with native wire grass, provided a glimpse of golf’s past in the Sandhills and the makings of the resort’s future.

Those aesthetics captivated both the television audience and the pros, allowing the course’s original strategic elements—its fearsome dome greens known as turtlebacks—to take center stage and not the ways in which the course was maintained. Though the restoration of No. 2 had occurred three years before the tournament, the success of the course in holding up to the challenges of both testing the best golfers in the world and hosting consecutive tournaments served as “catalyst for all the changes that happened” at Pinehurst, says Tom Pashley, president of Pinehurst.

Those changes have included updated new dining options, including The Deuce, whose patio overlooks the 18th green of No. 2 and where resort guests cheer—and sometimes playfully boo—their fellow golfers finishing up their rounds. A new brewery is located in the town’s former steam plant, and there has been a complete renovation of several other of the nine courses in the resort’s portfolio, including its No. 4 course by esteemed architect Gil Hanse, which along with No. 2 hosted the 2019 U.S. Amateur.

“I don’t know that we had any grand plans of taking [the renovations] as far as we have,” Pashley says when they started restoring No. 2, “but with each iteration [the resort] is just so well received and the appetite is strong for people to continue coming here.”

He goes on to cite the energy of the resort’s customers as a further catalyst to change and adds, “What I love to do is have somebody who hasn’t been to Pinehurst in the last five or ten years—when they come and visit it, they can’t believe it.”

The improvements at Pinehurst, in large part, are a reflection of a shift in the golf destination market largely brought on by the arrival of Bandon Dunes in Oregon, 25 years ago. At the time, many golf destinations had relied on either one architect or a handful of well-known former professional players turned architects to build their courses. Bandon presented a new paradigm in America, namely a links golf experience like that in Scotland and Ireland, where the game of golf as we know it was invented and first took shape. As Bandon’s own roster of courses grew, so did its popularity, and it forced other resorts to look at the formula for its success.

That No. 2 was indeed a world-class course, even prior to the restoration, was never really in doubt, though many people longed for it to return to its roots, including Tom Doak, who said the course had strayed too far from its origins. Beyond No. 2, though, traveling golfers had little reason to visit the other resort’s courses, which didn’t have the same cachet. The renovation of No. 4 helped a new breed of golfer, eager to try different kinds of golf, eager to play on courses that naturally reflected their native environs, discover another option at the resort. And, ironically, for a resort that’s hosted more championships than any other, it was its par-3 course, The Cradle, that might have done as much to change its image from living history to living history and must-see present. At less than 800 yards, The Cradle looks like No. 2’s little brother, but at any given time on any given day you can see it teems with golfers ages four through eighty, all with smiles on their faces.

And, like other golf resorts across the country, Pinehurst has seen a spike in demand, which has led it to add a tenth course. “We’ve got more visitors trying to come here, so we really were having a constraint of available tee times,” Pashley says. One of Pinehurst’s unique features is that it’s both a resort and a country club with its own members. A spike in the rolls of both almost necessitated a new course. No. 10 is being built by Tom Doak on the remnants of an old mining quarry and features wide playing corridors with a slew of undulating greens that invite shots to be run-up to their surface and will provide multiple pin positions that can change the playing strategy for each hole.

“I think No. 10 offers a lot of different elements that we don’t have on any of our other courses,” Pashley says, adding, “One of my favorites is just the setting.” The course is located four miles away from the main resort on an isolated piece of property. “While I love the hustle and bustle of courses one through five here at the main clubhouse, to me, it’s like a national park. Everyone is here; they’re all looking, they’re all admiring. But over there you can just listen to the silence and the sounds of nature.”

A new course and hosting a major championship. One of those would be a lot for any resort, but along with those, the resort has also completed a major renovation to its flagship hotel, The Carolina, which involved improvements to every guest room, including leveling floors to the hundred-plus year-old hotel, as well as reconfiguring many of the room’s spaces to accommodate the modern golfer. As Pashley points out, in the resort’s earliest days, guests were packing steamer trunks and staying for a month or more. Large closets in rooms are no longer needed. Coffee stations and soundproofing are.

So, when visitors and players arrive this June for one of golf’s oldest championships at one of its oldest venues, they’ll both see and experience the past through new, modern amenities that Pashley hopes, “carries us for the next fifty years.”

The post US Open Set to Return to Newly Renovated Pinehurst appeared first on JetsetMag.com.

Michael Croley

Few courses as young as the Ocean Course at Kiawah Island Resort have as much history, but the course surged onto international stage with the 1991 Ryder Cup, and no one has pulled the curtain on it yet. Aside from its slew of famous events, most recently the 2021 PGA Championship, the Ocean Course is one of the more demanding tests of golf in the world. While most resort courses are known for wide corridors and friendly, forgiving rough, the Ocean Course has managed to thread the needle of serving both the world’s elite golfers and the guests of the posh, five-star resort.

Kiawah is a slip of an island, 25 miles southwest of Charleston, and anchored by The Sanctuary Hotel, a tasteful hotel built to impart old world charm and heritage. The resort offers guests five golf courses to play but the Ocean Course is the jewel and also happens to be a nearly 20-minute drive from the hotel. Located near the easternmost point on the island, the Ocean Course is tucked away on an island that’s tucked away and the perfect location for a string of cottages the resort built in 2021 that border the course’s driving range. This new lodging option represents one of the coolest bespoke options for golf trips in the U.S. with unlimited access to the course’s driving range and a short walk to the Ryder Cup Bar located in the clubhouse.

Each 3,800 square-foot cottage features four bedrooms with king sized beds and private, en suite bathrooms as well as two large common areas. The first-floor features two large flat screen televisions, couches and lounge chairs, and a full kitchen in an open floor plan. The second floor features an area for poker and the sleeping area as well as a balcony that overlooks the driving range, and beyond that, the rolling Atlantic Ocean.

Kiawah’s cottages are not standalone accommodations. They are only available as part of an immersive, highly bespoke golf experience that in addition to lodging in the cottages includes daily round of golf, unlimited range time at The Ocean Course driving range, a dedicated concierge who arranges all dining, golf, activities and special requests, including stocking the kitchen and bar. Each cottage stay also includes daily breakfast and a personalized welcome amenity. The concierge can arrange exclusive dining experiences personally catered by one of the resort chef’s so that after your round, no need to shower up and hustle back up, but simply sit back and relax in your cottage as your meal is prepared.

The resort will, of course, help arrange all tee times and preparations ahead of time to ensure a smooth and easy trip once you’re on the island. And the golf? The Ocean Course is one of the more remarkable golf experiences to enjoy. Though the course is notoriously tough, a mid-handicapper (like myself) can still get around and break 90. The fairways are generous, giving wide berth, but missing the fairway is disastrous. The rough is penal and the beyond the rough are natural areas where your ball will not be found and if found will not accede to the movement of your club. The greens of the Ocean Course are mostly flat, keeping in line with most resort golf, but what separates many of the greens are that they are propped up, with deep falls offs that require either a chip, pitch, or putt to climb fifteen feet to find the putting surface. And then there is the wind, which is the X-factor of the course.

When the wind is up, hold and hope for the best. I’ve played the Ocean Course in still weather and in a driving rainstorm and the latter is by far tougher and more fun. The golf course is meant to challenge you and why not play it when the wind is up and rain is pelting you sideways? Every round at the Ocean Course is memorable, in part, for its history but also because each round tests you and while the ocean is a great sight, it’s the topography and flora of the Lowcountry that stand out to me on my walks around the property, not to mention the gators lounging by their lagoons.

One of the best places in golf to watch sunset is on the veranda of the Ryder Cup Bar, particularly, in mid-March, where you’ll see golfers roaming in from 18th fairway, to children rolling down the hill in the golden hour as drinks and stories are passed around. When you add the resort’s luxurious spa and fantastic restaurants—don’t miss the steak at The Ocean Room at the main hotel—Kiawah Resort is the spot for the golf trip that wants to level up and relax alongside world-class golf.

If you go, I like early spring but there’s never a bad time to visit Kiawah. The rates for the cottages range from $6,362 plus tax in the winter per night, while a three-night package in peak season (spring/fall) can top out at $16,653. The resort limits stays to two nights during the week and three nights on the weekend. For each day, golf is included at any of the resort’s five courses, and the resort will happily arrange transportation to and from Johns Island Airport, twenty-five minutes away.

Pack your bags, pack your sticks, but work on your game before you fly down.

The post Kiawah Island Resort: Lowcountry Luxury on the Links appeared first on JetsetMag.com.