Playa Grande to Become a Private (prestiged members-only) Golf Club/Course

aegap · Apr 3, 2006

But enjoy it, while you still can! ...,

In 2008, Playa Grande will become a private golf course for resident members.
In the meantime, it is open to the public. You can reserve a tee-time by contacting:

Lliliany G?mez

Reservations Coordinator

Playa Grande Golf Course

lgomez@playagrande.com

</SPAN class=style20>Tel. 809-582-0860 ext. 32

Fax. 809-582-9884
New York Office
Tel. 917-338-6148

By 2008

Hillbilly · Apr 3, 2006

I think that is a very stupid move on the part of the supposedly new buyers.
They need play and fame. Local residents will not give it either. They need to host PGA sectionals vacationing in the Caribbean, they need to pay the piper at Golf Magazine and Golf Digest, get world rankings and make some money. Casa de Campo did not get to be so famous a course by hiding as a private course.

They also need to host a lot of tournaments so the fame and the beauty of that course circulates all throughout golf circles around the world.

A lot more than my 2? worth.

HB :ermm:

aegap · Apr 3, 2006

...cake and eat it too(?)

..billy, (potentially,) won't Punta Espada do some of those things?

...billy, can't a private course still do all those things?

...billy, are you already missing the current good (but soon to become) old days

twhitehead · Apr 3, 2006

Sad

Very sad to see this. Good thing is it is two years away and lots will change by than. So much potential with this course...tom

aegap · Apr 3, 2006

...billy, I forgot,

wouldn't be surprised if tees-offs double in 2006, or if tees-offs triple in 2007....

..for scarcity (real, perceived or otherwise) is the mother of Marketing and Economics...

Gringo · Apr 4, 2006

This is not new news..............

What is going to take place in Playa Grande is in fact going to happen and any one who wants to cry the blues is to late, except it as fact as the money is laid down and nothing is going to stop this project. unless you have deeper pockets then Playa Grande Holdings Inc. (A.K.A. Herbert Koler and company Ltd. )

aegap · Apr 4, 2006

gee, Gringo, ...at least spell the wrong name right, [:laugh:...<--me]

... I am on your same wavelength with regards to the wrong name... I have a feeble hunch there is some other hidden moneyed "entity" behind this one..

Hillbilly · Apr 4, 2006

So it is your feeling that Herb Kohler is in back of this? That would be a major imporvement and certainly not take the course into a private country club-like situation.
Kohler is a golf nut and would really push PG...all the better. Hopefully, he would also assist the local golfers (hint, hint there Herb) to play his course.

Let's see how this plays out. Lots of new courses coming on line over the next three years...we won't lack for places to play.

HB

Tamborista · Apr 4, 2006

I thought Moby and NY socialite Ravenel Curry bought Playa grande last year.
Kohler washed his hands of this project.

Tamborista · Apr 4, 2006

http://www.dr1.com/travelnews/archive/2006/tnews022806.html

drtampa · Apr 4, 2006

Gringo:
Are you positive about Kohler being the buyer? If so it could not be better for all concerned and certainly will not be closed to the public.

Malibook · Apr 4, 2006

aegap said:
wouldn't be surprised if tees-offs double in 2006, or if tees-offs triple in 2007....

..for scarcity (real, perceived or otherwise) is the mother of Marketing and Economics...

This would not surprise me but I would be surprised if most people would pay this much.
Such ridiculous price increases would turn off a lot of their customers.
Value is much more important than scarcity to me.:tired:

abe · Apr 4, 2006

No matter how you spell it, it isn't Kohler.

Recently I was alerted to a New Yorker magazine article on this Playa Grande situation, and posters here filled me in. I now have the article and it is absolutely the New York City financiers and socialites, Boykin Curry and Celerie Kemble who are behind this acquisition.

Aside from having a club for people with odd names (Moby and Fareed) they have Utopian dreams of creating a haven for thinkers and dreamers--celebs and academics--who will create and recreate.

They are the latest limousine liberals, and I am all for it. Let's hope they succeed and that they do indeed create trickle down benefits for locals, unlike the A-I companies who skim the cash and bank it back home in Spain and other countries.

NALs · Apr 4, 2006

Malibook said:
This would not surprise me but I would be surprised if most people would pay this much.
Such ridiculous price increases would turn off a lot of their customers.
Value is much more important than scarcity to me.:tired:

This would not necessarily be the case.

Depending who becomes a member of the country club, then such price increases are justified.

Remember, when you pay country club fees, you are not just paying to play the course everyone who dreams about golf wants to play, you are also paying for the opportunity to bump into really important people at the club.

Remember, country club settings are not just for playing golf and enjoying the game or tennis or any other sport facilities they might have within the property. A country club setting is also a setting for socializing, meeting new people, possibly make a very good business deal and/or meet future business partners. Such aspect of country club settings are priceless, but since a price is placed on such privilige, whatever the rate and depending who is a member would either justify or not paying for such membership.

Country clubs are places to see and be seen, for a price.

-NALs

Gringo · Apr 4, 2006

If I told you my sourse I would have to kill you.

Lets just wait and see what happends....................you may be quite surprised.

kdeer · Apr 4, 2006

Sea Horse Ranch

Any updates on the new course that is supposed to be opening at Sea Horse Ranch. When I was there in March I was told that construction was starting in April....

Malibook · Apr 4, 2006

NALs said:
This would not necessarily be the case.
-NALs

I was not implying that the private club would not succeed.
I was simply stating that it is quite likely that many of the current customers would not pay 2 or 3 times what they are currently paying.
Even a 50% increase would probably turn off many people.

aegap · Apr 4, 2006

Number of memberships available at Cap Cana's Punta Espada, a Jack Nick. signiture course: ~500

Price per membership: ~US$50,000

DR becoming the golf mecca of the Caribbean: Priceless!!

(PlayaGrande has more ocean front holes then Punta Espada ..and then there iss the bluff...)

aegap · Apr 4, 2006

Curry is the guy

His project a plush playground in paradise

The New Yorker,

[Boykin] Curry, who is forty, [is] a highly successful money manager from Manhattan. He own the course, the cliffs, the mountains behind the cliffs, the rolling jungles in between, the bluffs out to the east-everything in the area [of Playa Grande], as far as the eye could see, except for the Occidental [hotel]. And even that was just a matter of time; he and [Celerie] Kemble, a thirty-two-year-old interior designer, already controlled the hotel's water supply, beach access, and electricity, and were in negotiations to buy and demolish it.

[...]
Boykin Curry's crowd is a Hamptons-going crowd, so a considerable component of the initial Playa Grande sales pitch involved playing up the convenience of the D.R. as an alternate A-list weekend refuge-"the new Hamptons," as Curry told me shortly after we first met. (By "new Hamptons," he later clarified, he meant "like the Hamptons were in the seventies.") Continental and American Airlines run frequent flights to the Dominican north shore that are, at least in theory, only three and a half hours long-surely no great deterrent for anyone accustomed to the Long Island Expressway.

In February of last year, Curry secured a private 737 jet for a weekend day trip to show the place off. For months, he had been asking acquaintances to name the ten New Yorkers they'd most like to invite to dinner, and, as the principal ingredient in his experiment in "creative meritocracy," he drew up a studiedly eclectic list of fifty people. Alongside the early movers (Moby, Rose, Zakaria), it included the New York Giants lineman Michael Strahan; the fashion-world scion Alex von Furstenberg; a former U.N. official, Nader Mousavizadeh; a couple of actors (Mariska Hargitay and Christopher Meloni, from "Law & Order: S.V.U."); Lee Bollinger, the president of Columbia University; and a New Jersey billboard executive named Drew Katz.

[...]
Curry is in for roughly fifty per cent of the over-all Playa Grande investment, with the bulk of the twenty co-founders pitching in about a million dollars each. (Moby [a member resident],, who says he is "not much of a beach person," told me that he was drawn to "the possibility of being involved in a development project that wasn't guided strictly by avarice.") But Curry retains one-hundred-per-cent control over all decision-making. [..]

[...]
As initially drawn up by the landscape architects Hart Howerton, whom Curry hired last spring, Playa Grande is to have four main geographical components, two of them more pragmatic than idealistic. For avid golfers, villas will be built to accompany the course at the west end; a luxury boutique hotel, operated by the Singapore-based chain Aman Resorts, will occupy the property's eastern edge. (Aman's founder, Adrian Zecha, maintains a hotelier's version of the utopian spirit: "Our basic philosophy is not to impose man-made design on the land but, rather, to have the land tell us what we should be doing.") On the higher ground between them will be farms, an equestrian center, a science research facility, and a nature preserve. [An] artists' colony, for a hundred artists in all, will be closer to the central beach village[...]

[...]
Last summer, in an act of publicspirited good will, Curry offered to host a cattle auction down by the beach at Playa Grande.[...]
[...]
As we drove on [Jorge] Cavoli, [the mayor of Cabrera], described a plan of his own, which involved building a malacon, or promenade, along a desolate stretch of oceanfront rocks, which he hoped would spur still more commercial development. The hitch: it might cost half a million dollars to build. Curry, assuming his role as future employer and caretaker, asked about income taxes, wages, and health care. [...]

[..]
The day after the auction, while driving Curry and me to a recently restored cove-hints of what a little largesse could achieve-Cavoli drew attention to the smooth conditions of a side street and said, "We have paved these roads. Before, it was like the Old West." Then he called out, "Hey, who's that guy on the truck?," and pointed to the side of a large garbage rig, which was emblazoned with a smiling image of his face

[...]
On the morning of December 31st, in Cabrera, Curry leaned out his car window to chastise a Dominican man for littering, and wound up in a shouting match. (Curry knows no Spanish; the Dominican knew enough English to respond, "**** you!") "Now I'm waiting for my Larry David moment," Curry said. "When the guy turns up on the town land-use commission."

[Curry] had a couple of bruises on his forehead from several days of boogie-boarding. He and Kemble had been down at Playa Grande since Christmas, entertaining sixty-odd guests-the biggest group yet[...]

[...]
A couble of weeks later, Curry sent me [the following] e-mail:

We have been talking further with Mayor Jorge of Cabrera, and have decided to help with the promenade and to endow an ongoing performance program every Friday evening. The performances will mix high and low, with classical music and outdoor films alternating each week with Dominican and pop bands. I think that will change the entire feel of the town.

Curry also authorized his utopia's first three capital investments: the 1,082volume collection of Penguin classics, for an eventual Playa Grande library; an entire art installation from the P.S. 1 gallery, in Queens; and new irrigation equipment for the golf course. [....]

[Architect] Richard Meier himself finally flew down in August, and raved about the Dominican citizenry, among other things: "They're very friendly and calm. They're always smiling all the time. Very happy people."

[..]

Richard Meier's office had recently produced a sort of fluid city plan, for the five hundred acres nearest the main beach, and included with it sample home designs, such as a studio "cube," equipped with solar panels, and a modernist tree house, allowing even for the possibility, in some cases, of submerging buildings into the slope, leaving earthen roofs.

[...]
Curry ha ~~closed on the purchase of the Occidental hotel, with any luck the bulldozers would be arriving to level the place by the end of the peak season-say, April.~~

[...]

-Ben McGrath

The New Yorker is wholly owned by Cond? Nast Publications, Inc. , ...

... one ...

three related threads

NALs · Apr 4, 2006

aegap said:
Number of membership available at Cap Cana's Punta Espada, a Jack Nick. signiture course: ~500

Price per membership: ~US$50,000

DR becoming the golf mecca of the Caribbean: Priceless!!

(PlayaGrande has more ocean front holes then Punta Espada ..and then there is the bluff)

You forgot this one:

For everything else, there's mastercard.

-NALs

Playa Grande to Become a Private (prestiged members-only) Golf Club/Course

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