Want to enjoy never-to-be-built-out views? It may be time to tee off
You don’t need to be a golfer to enjoy the benefits of living adjacent to a golf course in Australia
3 min
From the Spring 2024 issue of Kanebridge Quarterly. Order your copy here.
W hile water views are usually considered most desirable for property buyers, golf course vistas are snapping at their proverbial heels. This past quarter century has witnessed a golden age in Australian golf course living, with dozens — if not hundreds— of residential courses built around our major cities and tourist towns. These days, there’s a buoyant market for established large golf homes alongside off-the-plan apartments being retro built to take advantage of existing golf course views. So what’s the appeal?
Green dreams
Barbara Wolveridge is a director at Sotheby’s International Realty. She has worked with many of Australia’s most prestigious golf course developments including The National in Cape Schanck Vic, Moonah Links on the Mornington Peninsula, Macquarie Links International Golf Club in Sydney’s West and the Mirage Country Club in Port Douglas where she currently lives. (She was also married to the late renowned golf course designer and former US Tour player Michael Wolveridge.)
“People like to live on golf courses,” she says. “You can walk out of your house onto a beautiful course. But what you’re really buying is the extended view. You have acres and acres in front of you, but you’re paying for a small block of land.”
And while you can’t run across the greens in your bare feet, as soon as the golf is finished for the day, there are tracks and cart paths where you can walk and bike, enjoying the natural surrounds of lush greenery and wildlife.
“Some courses are a haven for wallabies and kangaroos,” says Wolveridge. “Here in Port Douglas the pristine ponds attract the magpie geese. There are the most beautiful birds everywhere — and the odd croc as well.”
Who’s buying?
While you might expect golfing real estate to be the exclusive domain of well-heeled golf-mad retirees, that’s only a part of the story. Golfing homes appeal to a broad section of the community, especially in the post-COVID era, when home often also serves as an office.
“Probably 50 to 60 percent of my buyers are golfers,” says Wolveridge. “But in some areas people skew younger, in their 40s — not necessarily golfers, but those who want that lovely view. A lot of people like to come up here for the winter and when they’re not here, they rent out their properties.
“My very wealthy clients don’t do that, but the middle bracket come and use it when they like, and then it goes into the letting pool for the rest of the year.”
A cautionary tale
For most golf course adjacent dwellers, the only potential negative is the odd Titleist Pro V1 ball shattering the serenity as it sails through the bedroom window. But that’s not the worst thing that can happen.
Built in 1990 on the edge of the Great Dividing Range, Paradise Palms in Cairns lived up to its name with pristine rainforest providing a backdrop to rolling fairways and man-made lakes. Home to professional events including the Skins Game and Ladies’ Masters, it climbed to number nine ranking in Golf Magazine’s list of the nation’s Best Public Access Courses.
In 2016, the signature 7th hole was sacrificed to make way for an access road into a residential development of 585 luxury units. Then, horror. The course declined under new owners, was sold again, and a multimillion-dollar redevelopment plan was revealed that would close the 18-hole course and transform it into a new housing estate.
Those who dreamed of seeing out their days overlooking manicured greens are now facing the prospect of a sea of roofs.
“Once a development is established, it has to make money,” says Wolveridge. “The developer has to put in somebody who knows how to run a golf course — and that is the hard part.
“If the developer isn’t making any money, it won’t necessarily devalue the properties, but if the course does so badly it goes broke, that is the danger.”
Happily, cases like Paradise Palms are few and far between.
“I can think of so many golf course developments in Australia that are very successful, and probably only three or four that aren’t,” says Wolveridge.
As always with property, to avoid a triple bogey, it’s a case of buyer beware.
How green is your view?
A commonly held belief is that golf courses use vast amounts of water, chemical pesticides and fertilisers to keep those greens pristine. In reality, golf course management in Australia claims to be at the forefront of environmental sustainability, pioneering the use of grey water and efficient irrigation techniques as well as new drought- and disease-resistant grasses.
Following the release of the landmark GC2030 report by The Royal and Ancient Golf Club (R&A) in Scotland in 2018, Australia has joined a dozen or so other countries globally answering the call to action on topics such as climate change, resources, water conservation, pesticides, labour and land.
While golf courses have historically relied on a cocktail of pesticides and herbicides, many are today transitioning to organic maintenance practices, using natural means to control pests and promote healthy turf.
KDV Sport golf course (12 holes) on the Gold Coast and Kabi Organic Golf Club (27 holes) at Boreen Point in the Sunshine Coast hinterland are Australia’s only two organic golf courses to date. But there is no accommodation — yet — at either.
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Weary of ‘smart’ everything, Americans are craving stylish ‘analog rooms’ free of digital distractions—and designers are making them a growing trend.
5 min
James and Ellen Patterson are hardly Luddites. But the couple, who both work in tech, made an unexpectedly old-timey decision during the renovation of their 1928 Washington, D.C., home last year.
The Pattersons had planned to use a spacious unfinished basement room to store James’s music equipment, but noticed that their children, all under age 21, kept disappearing down there to entertain themselves for hours without the aid of tablets or TVs.
Inspired, the duo brought a new directive to their design team.
The subterranean space would become an “analog room”: a studiously screen-free zone where the family could play board games together, practice instruments, listen to records or just lounge about lazily, undistracted by devices.
For decades, we’ve celebrated the rise of the “smart home”—knobless, switchless, effortless and entirely orchestrated via apps.
But evidence suggests that screen-free “dumb” spaces might be poised for a comeback.
Many smart-home features are losing their luster as they raise concerns about surveillance and, frankly, just don’t function.
New York designer Christine Gachot said she’d never have to work again “if I had a dollar for every time I had a client tell me ‘my smart music system keeps dropping off’ or ‘I can’t log in.’ ”
Google searches for “how to reduce screen time” reached an all-time high in 2025. In the past four years on TikTok, videos tagged #AnalogLife—cataloging users’ embrace of old technology, physical media and low-tech lifestyles—received over 76 million views.
And last month, Architectural Digest reported on nostalgia for old-school tech : “landline in hand, cord twirled around finger.”
Catherine Price, author of “ How to Break Up With Your Phone,” calls the trend heartening.
“People are waking up to the idea that screens are getting in the way of real life interactions and taking steps through design choices to create an alternative, places where people can be fully present,” said Price, whose new book “ The Amazing Generation ,” co-written with Jonathan Haidt, counsels tweens and kids on fun ways to escape screens.
From both a user and design perspective, the Pattersons consider their analog room a success.
Freed from the need to accommodate an oversize television or stuff walls with miles of wiring, their design team—BarnesVanze Architects and designer Colman Riddell—could get more creative, dividing the space into discrete music and game zones.
Ellen’s octogenarian parents, who live nearby, often swing by for a round or two of the Stock Market Game, an eBay-sourced relic from Ellen’s childhood that requires calculations with pen and paper.
In the music area, James’s collection of retro Fender and Gibson guitars adorn walls slicked with Farrow & Ball’s Card Room Green , while the ceiling is papered with a pattern that mimics the organic texture of vintage Fender tweed.
A trio of collectible amps cluster behind a standing mic—forming a de facto stage where family and friends perform on karaoke nights. Built-in cabinets display a Rega turntable and the couple’s vinyl record collection.
“Playing a game with family or doing your own little impromptu karaoke is just so much more joyful than getting on your phone and scrolling for 45 minutes,” said James.
Screen-Free ‘Escapes’
“Dumb” design will likely continue to gather steam, said Hans Lorei, a designer in Nashville, Tenn., as people increasingly treat their homes “less as spaces to optimise and more as spaces to retreat.”
Case in point: The top-floor nook that designer Jeanne Hayes of Camden Grace Interiors carved out in her Connecticut home as an “offline-office” space.
Her desk? A periwinkle beanbag chair paired with an ottoman by Jaxx. “I hunker down here when I need to escape distractions from the outside world,” she explained.
“Sometimes I’m scheming designs for a project while listening to vinyl, other times I’m reading the newspaper in solitude. When I’m in here without screens, I feel more peaceful and more productive at the same time—two things that rarely go hand in hand.”
A subtle archway marks the transition into designer Zoë Feldman’s Washington, D.C., rosy sunroom—a serene space she conceived as a respite from the digital demands of everyday life.
Used for reading and quiet conversation, it “reinforces how restorative it can be to be physically present in a room without constant input,” the designer said.
Laura Lubin, owner of Nashville-based Ellerslie Interiors, transformed a tiny guest bedroom in her family’s cottage into her own “wellness room,” where she retreats for sound baths, massages and reflection.
“Without screens, the room immediately shifts your nervous system. You’re not multitasking or consuming, you’re just present,” said Lubin.
As a designer, she’s fielding requests from clients for similar spaces that support mental health and rest, she said.
“People are overstimulated and overscheduled,” she explained. “Homes are no longer just places to live—they’re expected to actively support well-being.”
Designer Molly Torres Portnof of New York’s DATE Interiors adopted the same brief when she designed a music room for her husband, owner of the labels Greenway Records and Levitation, in their Lido Beach, N.Y. home. He goes there nightly to listen to records or play his guitar.
The game closet from the townhouse in “The Royal Tenenbaums”? That idea is back too, says Gachot. Last year she designed an epic game room backed by a rock climbing wall for a young family in Montana.
When you’re watching a show or on your phone, “it’s a solo experience for the most part,” the designer said. “The family really wanted to encourage everybody to do things together.”
Analog Accessories
Don’t have the space—or the budget—to kit out an entire retro rec room?
“There are a lot of small tweaks you can make even if you don’t have the time, energy or budget to design a fully analog room from scratch,” said Price.
Gachot says “the small things in people’s lives are cues of what the bigger trends are.”
More of her clients, she’s noticed, have been requesting retrograde staples, such as analog clocks and magazine racks.
For her Los Angeles living room, chef Sara Kramer sourced a vintage piano from Craigslist to be the room’s centerpiece, rather than sacrifice its design to the dominant black box of a smart TV. Alabama designer Lauren Conner recently worked with a client who bought a home with a rotary phone.
Rather than rip it out, she decided to keep it up and running, adding a silver receiver cover embellished with her grandmother’s initials.
Some throwback accessories aren’t so subtle. Melia Marden was browsing listings from the Public Sale Auction House in Hudson, N.Y. when she spotted a phone booth from Bell Systems circa the late 1950s and successfully bid on it for a few hundred dollars.
“It was a pandemic impulse buy,” said Marden.
In 2023, she and her husband, Frank Sisti Jr., began working with designer Elliot Meier and contractor ReidBuild to integrate the booth into what had been a hallway linen closet in their Brooklyn townhouse.
Canadian supplier Old Phone Works refurbished the phone and sold them the pulse-to-tone converter that translates the rotary dial to a modern phone line.
The couple had collected a vintage whimsical animal-adorned wallpaper (featured in a different colourway in “Pee-wee’s Playhouse”) and had just enough to cover the phone booth’s interior.
Their children, ages 9 and 11, don’t have their own phones, so use the booth to communicate with family. It’s also become a favorite spot for hiding away with a stack of Archie comic books.
The booth has brought back memories of meandering calls from Marden’s own youth—along with some of that era’s simple joy. As Meier puts it: “It’s got this magical wardrobe kind of feeling.”
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