South Street Partners (“South Street”), one of the largest owners and operators of private residential club and resort communities in the United States – including Kiawah Island, Palmetto Bluff, The Cliffs, Naples Grande, Barnsley Resort, Elevation Hotel & Spa,
The King and Prince Beach & Golf Resort and Residences at Salamander – is thrilled to announce plans for a new 18-hole course designed by the legendary team of Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw, one of golf architecture’s top pairings responsible for some of the game’s most celebrated designs. Sited on approximately 500 acres and estimated to open Winter 2025 – 2026, the yet unnamed course’s first phase of construction will include the golf course, a maintenance facility and temporary amenities with a clubhouse planned for a second phase.
The announcement of this new course follows the exciting opening earlier this year of ‘Crossroads,’ Palmetto Bluff’s new reversible nine-hole course from acclaimed golf architecture firm, King-Collins Golf Course Design.
Since assuming ownership of the property in 2021, South Street has worked closely with the Palmetto Bluff Conservancy, a non-profit organization founded in 2003 to protect the land and wetlands throughout the community. Guided by their founding principle of “Designing with Nature,” an approach to development that prioritizes conservation to safeguard natural habitats – while enhancing stakeholder value – South Street acts to ensure a balance of environmental beauty with human activity. Coore & Crenshaw – renowned for designs imbued with a deep sense of place showcasing regional elements – were the natural choice for the conservation-minded firm’s new course.
They were also already familiar with Palmetto Bluff, having walked the exact Lowcountry acreage decades before when a previous owner had considered building a golf course which had never come to fruition.
“Nearly 17 years ago our design company was scheduled to build a course at Palmetto Bluff.
That course never became a reality; but now South Street Partners, owners of Palmetto Bluff, have given us a second chance to join one of America’s most admired communities. We are excited about the potential of the site we’ve been given and the opportunity to create a course
that hopefully can become a complement to the long history of golf in the Carolina community,”
said Bill Coore designer and co-founder, Coore & Crenshaw.
“We are honored to be starting the new course at Palmetto Bluff. We have a beautiful piece of land to work with and have been looking forward to doing something there for many years. It’s a special place,” said Ben Crenshaw, designer and co-founder, Coore & Crenshaw.
Located on Palmetto Bluff’s East end – and anchoring what will eventually be the community’s third village, Anson – the new course will embrace a different approach to golf. Unlike most Lowcountry courses which are laid out with residential real estate in mind, South Street requested the Coore &
Crenshaw team make their decisions without a land planning model dictating where the course needed to go. No residential component enabled the team to design a pure golf landscape for a pure golfing experience. Due to the lack of homes on the course, Anson Village will have a powerful sense of arrival, and this sublime trip will continue as golfers follow the game through the course’s four different forest types (upland pine/maritime/live oaks/salt palmettos and sabal palmettos) into wide-open spaces with dramatic coastal vistas and several holes bordering the picturesque bluffs with expansive marsh views on the New River.
Each hole will have a variety of tee boxes providing multiple levels of challenge, distance, and site lines. The land between the holes will be managed areas of native flora and fauna composed of sparkleberry, silky aster, fox tail, goldenrod, and wiry broom sedge. Like the Coore & Crenshaw restoration of Pinehurst No. 2, grass lines will transition directly into the native edges which will be a blend of dense woodland, open quail woods, sandy brush, freshwater wetlands and saltwater marsh. There are currently 3.5 acres of putting surface, including 1 practice green and 1 chipping green, planned.
“Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw have designed some of the most extraordinary golf courses around the world, so they were the obvious first choice for our new course at Palmetto Bluff” said Chris Randolph, Partner, South Street Partners. “Our vision was perfectly aligned from the start – to create a masterpiece that would not only be exciting to play but would also fit within its setting as though it could have been built a hundred years ago.”
South Street’s approach dovetails with Coore & Crenshaw’s belief in laying a course naturally so that it looks comfortable, like it belongs there as well as with the Conservancy’s mission. The Conservancy will continue to manage the land around the course, and native areas within the course, with maintenance such as prescribed burns, and out of the several hundred acres set aside for the course, only about 80 have been cleared for playing surface, so much of the allotted land will remain as is.
This also aligns with Coore’s famous process — most of his design happens during the construction — as he gets to know the land: the golf course was already here; it is just revealing itself to him. Coore & Crenshaw has created some of the most beloved courses in the United States and around the world: New Zealand’s Te Arai Links South Course, dubbed “a 17-Mile Drive for the Southern Hemisphere”; Lahaina, Hawaii’s Kapalua Plantation, the first design collaboration by Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw and home of the PGA Tour’s opening event each year; Wicker Point Golf Club in Lake Martin, Coore & Crenshaw’s first course design in Alabama;
The Back Yard at McArthur Golf Club in Hobe Sound, FL, designed to blend in with the natural surroundings utilizing sand dunes and native wetlands; and the just completed Point Hardy Golf Club at Cabot Saint Lucia, whose stunning oceanfront course is destined to become one of the world’s most sought after golf destinations.
South Street’s investment and development experience in the luxury marketplace provides the opportunity to impact and improve every aspect of a project, from concept to execution and operations. The new Coore & Crenshaw course is part of a slate of unique programs and amenities South Street is integrating to augment the incredible lifestyle and real estate offerings Palmetto Bluff is known for and demonstrably raise the membership experience for all stakeholders.
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