FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact:
Theresa Martin
Doonbeg Golf Club
PO Box 12001
Charleston, SC 29422
O: 843-768-5220
F: 843-768-5727
theresa_martin@doonbeggolfclub.com

PRESS RELEASE

Innovation Steeped in History - Doonbeg Golf Club Offers Unique Accommodations

May 17, 2007

The country house is alive and well and revived in Ireland thanks to a daring creative vision forged in the US

Doonbeg, County Clare, Ireland – Being lashed by horizontal rain and a roaring wind straight off the Atlantic wouldn't be everyone's idea of inspiration, but when Buddy Darby and Leonard Long first set foot on the rugged dunes at Doonbeg on Ireland's west coast they knew they'd found something special.

Since that day in late 1999, the South Carolina duo have overseen the creation first of an internationally renowned golf course along County Clare's Doughmore Bay and now, at its head, a luxurious and quietly spectacular accommodation complex.

It's anchored by a Lodge daringly conceived by their architect John Haley as a country house in the late Elizabethan style - all jutting gables and dormers, with mullioned bay windows and muscular stack chimneys. The building contains 15 elegantly furnished one to three-bedroom suites spread across three floors. Several feature winding staircases which add a touch of drama to the general feel of cosy luxury. There are also formal dining rooms and, in one wing, a club house including spacious bar, lounge, and billiards room. Locker rooms and a spa occupy the basement.

Set around the Lodge are lime-rendered buildings in a vernacular cottage style which house another 32 suites and form a courtyard that fulfills one of the concept's key objectives, to create, in Haley's words, "a shelter, an oasis from the rawness of the site." The $150 million development as a whole combines a bold creative vision with imaginative and eclectic use of furnishings and materials, and sensitivity to the geography and culture of the surroundings.

A magnificent opportunity
Darby and Long, who had focused hitherto on golf and accommodation at the 10,000-acre Kiawah Island in South Carolina, were initially tentative about the opportunity created by an enterprising local corporation's acquisition of farmland at Doonbeg. "We went over thinking we'd have a couple of Guinness and come right back again," says Darby, "but when we stepped out on that site we realised it might be the only time in our lives that we could be involved in something as rare as that. It was a magnificent piece of links land and it was remarkable for such a site to be available anywhere in the world."

The inspiration has rubbed off on discerning golf travellers. All the suites were sold by the time they opened in May 2006. The same now goes for all but a few of a new phase of 17 larger four-bedroom course-side cottages, which like the satellite buildings on the main site are characterised by extensive natural light and sight lines to the sea. And there's conceivably more to come. There are currently some 150 bedrooms at Doonbeg, but permission for 500 in all. "We will continue to build as the market dictates," says Darby.

A diverse experience
The suite owners, and guests who rent the accommodations, can take in deceptively diverse ambiences within Doonbeg's public and private spaces. The Lodge offers understated country house elegance marked by classical mouldings and mantelpieces, shoulder architraves to Georgian-style doors set in panelled recesses, and painstakingly selected antique furniture and art. Diners in the three-section Long Room enjoy quiet, fully carpeted refinement amid a muted duck-egg blue colour scheme, with views of breaking Atlantic waves made possible by Haley's decision to raise the ground floor seven feet above its originally planned height.

But through the door to the clubhouse wing is the boisterous back slapping of the Irish pub, evoked in the Members' bar. It's a large, bay windowed, L-shaped space whose roaring stone fireplace, banquettes and dark wood intimacy are designed to generate the legendary Irish craic and fuel tall tales of bunker escapes and birdies amid tight clusters of stocky Windsor chairs.

Just across a flagstone hall is the flipside of the Member experience, the lounge, a large yet intimate, beautifully proportioned and comfortable space that comes closest to representing the English country house style. The room effortlessly interweaves two discrete seating arrangements with quiet individual nooks and accommodates a grand piano with apparent serenity.

Impressive marble-clad locker rooms underline Doonbeg's ambitions as a prestige golf destination, as does the calm feng shui modernity of the adjacent state-of-the-art spa, the work of New York-based, Irish born designer Clodagh. A further shift in tone is provided by a linked, pitched-roof stucco building that caters for both residents and visiting golfers and houses a golf pro shop together with an informal dining spot, Darby's, that's essentially a down-scale version of the Members' bar with exposed rafters and beams and a cosy miscellany of Windsor and Orkney chairs.

Creating a unified environment
All these varying experiences are knitted into a coherent whole by a desire to create a comfortable, relaxed, and warm environment in defiance of the sometimes harsh seaside elements. Running throughout the Lodge and outlying buildings is a heavy emphasis on reclaimed timber, most of it sourced by KDP's US salvage expert Wyatt "Bo" Childs. Ceiling beams have come from 19th century Charleston buildings and Kentucky log cabins, while richly toned French oak is the dominant flooring material, augmented by English York stone slabs. Equally prevalent are rustic chandeliers in heavy dark wood or iron, whose almost medieval flavour is a denial of aristocratic affectation. And Irish linens, wools and plaids have also been used throughout. There's even a bespoke brown and blue tartan, produced for Doonbeg by John Hanly & Co, a renowned Tipperary weaver.

Working alongside Haley to create this unhurried warmth was Jacquelynne P. Lanham, the sought-after Atlanta interior designer who has a strong bond with the KDP team through previous Kiawah projects. She describes the overall decorative scheme as, "designed disorder – a collected, tasteful look that gives you the feeling that pieces have been accumulated over many years." This effect is reinforced by antique furniture gathered over three years not just from England and Ireland but also from France, Germany, Scandinavia, and Italy.

Lanham designed all the public spaces and eight of the Lodge suites, supported by the Dublin duo Rhona Roe and Ciara Nilaoi, of CLR Design, who handled the remaining interiors. The three have striven to create the feeling that, in Roe's words "the house has been there for generations".

Tee-ing off and coming home
Just as important as these feelings of permanence is the creation of a communal experience that revolves, naturally, around golf and feeds its accompanying social buzz. Golfers tee off within yards of Darby's bay window and "come home" down the 18th fairway, sinking their putts within sight of the double-fronted clubhouse wing. This is not unconventional, but Haley has made it more interesting than usual. Partly by exploiting the added fascination of the buildings' subterranean level, he has linked the spaces in a way that offers myriad routes in to Doonbeg's core activity. "You can go from the Members' bar to the pro shop or to the shower room, and from there to Darby's to have a sandwich and then go and play. You're encouraged to circulate – you can get to the first tee from all directions, nothing is dead-ended. I tried to create the sense of a labyrinth, so you feel like you're discovering the building over and over again," says Haley.

Back to the future
At the same time, Haley has recreated the country house with uncommon dedication. KDP acquired the Doonbeg scheme with planning consents that included a generic American-style golfing hotel. But Long, Darby, and Haley quickly decided that, while they had to operate within the basic constraints of building height and proximity to the sea, they wanted a different aesthetic, one that inspired them and, says Darby, "respected where we were."

A shared fascination with the English and Irish country house set the architect off on a ten-day road trip around Ireland's great houses, photographing and measuring proportions of the most inspirational buildings.

Perhaps the most important was Muckross House in Killarney, County Kerry, a Victorian mansion built in the Tudor style. Its gables and bays, and their relationship to the mass of the building, are clearly echoed in Doonbeg's Lodge. Emphatically different, though, is the use of a richly coloured sedimentary sandstone. "I didn't want to use the Clare limestone because when it rains – and it rains a lot there – it looks dark and grey. I wanted to lighten things up, while still making the building look grounded and strong, as though it had been battered by the weather over the years." The stone, quarried in Kerry, was discovered by chance when Haley, on one of his research trips, saw it being used to build a garage. "I knew straight away that was the stone we wanted." The Lodge exterior's other key element is its antique Montana roof slates, a prime example of the lengths to which KDP was prepared to go in search of the right look.

Telling a story
Just as important at Doonbeg Golf Club was the architectural attention devoted to out-buildings. The Garden and Norman suite blocks relate to the Lodge as the stables and servants' quarters of a house whose front looks out to the sea, untroubled by comings and goings, which are routed, in the manner of country houses, to the rear.

The dedication to the creation of character rather than uniformity is followed through in the accommodations. In the Lodge, no suite layout is used twice, while in the other buildings, set floor plans mirror each other in pairs and simple clean lines characterise the spaces. Adding to the whimsical charm, no two suites are decorated the same. The Lodge's colour scheme takes its cue from the browns, greens, greys and blues of the sea, grasses, birds, wildflowers, and stone walls, but the cottages use a bracing near-white to evoke lime wash. The two experiences are united nevertheless by their beams, fabrics, and flooring and the high-class specification of modern kitchens, and bathrooms floored and clad with carrera marble or grey Clare marble, and equipped with glass doored walk-in rain showers.

Dilligence rewarded
It's been a labour of love, says Buddy Darby: "It's not just another job. Everyone has been emotionally attached to it and has worked so hard to get it right."

The rewards are not just financial, he adds: "When we were three quarters of the way through building the Lodge – the roof was on, I think – I was walking around it with an Irish guy and he asked me, 'how long has it taken you to renovate this old place?' That was the ultimate compliment."

Doonbeg Golf Club is a private club with limited visitor access to golf and accommodation upon availability. Membership is by invitation only; inquiries are entertained. Contact Theresa Martin at 843-768-5220 or email theresa_martin@doonbeggolfclub.com for additional information.

KDP is the master developer of Kiawah Island, a 10,000-acre sea island located 21 miles south of Charleston, South Carolina. In addition to Doonbeg Golf Club, the company's affiliates include Kiawah Island Real Estate; The Kiawah Island Club, which encompasses the Tom Fazio-designed River Course, the Tom Watson-designed Cassique Golf Course, the Beach Club, and Sasanqua, the Members-only spa; and Freshfields Village.