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Top 100 Platinum Clubs of the World

Top 100 Platinum Clubs of the World Content

  • 2021 Ranked 20
  • 2019 Ranked 23
  • 2017 Ranked 26
  • 2015 Ranked 31
  • 2013 Certified First in KOREA

Platinum status is the most revered and respected recognition for Private Clubs around the world. Acknowledgment as a Platinum Club is an honor for the Leadership, Members and Staff of the Clubs they represent.

The Platinum Clubs® of the World election is conducted by Club Leaders Forum every two years. Platinum Clubs are recognized as they excel in best practices and represent the benchmark and standard of Excellence for the finest Private Golf & Country Clubs, City Clubs and, Yacht Clubs around the globe.

The Top 100 Golf & Country Clubs, Top 100 City Clubs and Top 50 Yacht Clubs are elected by an international Panel of experts, historians and connoisseurs using the Seven Selection Criteria as approved by the Club Leaders Forum Advisory Board. The Panelists engage in a confidential voting process to elect Platinum Clubs and the results are certified as true and correct.

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Golf Environment Organization

Golf Environment Organization Content

  • GEO Certified 01/2014
  • GEO Re-Certified 11/2017

Haesley Nine Bridges celebrates its position in the Platinum Clubs of the World top 100 with the award of the GEO Certified ecolabel – golf’s internationally accredited mark of sustainability. The golf club in South Korea, which opened in 2009 and hosted the Asian Tour’s CJ Invitational in 2011, has also been recognized for winning a sustainable architecture award for the design and construction of its clubhouse.

GEO Certified demonstrates a commitment to continual improvement in the areas of nature, water, energy, supply chain, pollution control and community. After completing an online report detailing their management activities, Haesley Nine Bridges joined the global community of GEO Certified clubs. The club was verified by a 3rd party sustainability expert and met broad and important standards within the previously mentioned themes.

Sensitive construction of the golf course ensured that the landscape retained its character and views of the surrounding hills, while a programme to preserve existing natural vegetation helped to maintain the ecological value of the area.

Mr. Ahn Myeong Hoon, chief executive of Haesley Nine Bridges: ‘We are delighted to become the first club in South Korea to achieve GEO Certified. Since 2009 we have realized projects on and off the course to benefit our environment, our members, employees, and the local community, and which will also help us reduce our long-term expenditure. We look forward to discovering what else we can do to develop our sustainability aims’.

Highlights from the club’s OnCourse report include: Fairway reduction programme to increase low maintenance rough grassland by 10% 1000m2 of aquatic vegetation planted around naturalized pond margins Native wild flowers and grass species planted on slopes to reduce erosion potential after construction Planting of 8000 trees and 5000 shrubs to help connect internal and external habitats 80% of irrigation water sourced from waste water treatment facilities and rainwater stored on-site Award winning low-energy designed clubhouse Provides fieldwork opportunities for several local universtities Developing pathways through woodlands for non-golfers in the community On-site organic farm producing food for members and employees GPS screens on electric golf carts with specific information about course locations, maps and newsletters YS Baek, independent verifier from the GEOSA network: “Haesley has quickly grasped the issues of ongoing resource and landscape management and has established a future-oriented sustainability strategy for the club. The GEO certification has generated ideas for continual improvement that will greatly contribute to an environmentally and socio-economically enhanced Yeojusi community.”

Richard Allison, GEO certification manager: ‘Haesley Nine Bridges has begun their sustainability journey with great potential. The club is keenly aware that local, practical sustainability can positively reach far and wide, and the club can become a leading example of sustainable golf business management in South Korea’. To find out more about Haesley Nine Bridges and their ongoing sustainability work, read the full OnCourse report.

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The 10 most beautiful ceilings in the World

The 10 Most Beautiful Ceilings in the World

Designed by Shigeru Ban, the Japanese architect famous for a new generation of paper and cardboard buildings, this country club opened in 2010 features a notably elegant atrium lobby. A laminated timber grid shell supported seamlessly by lightweight, three-storey-high columns of the same material forms its ceiling and roof. Computer cut, columns and grid shell employ as little material as possible.

The filigree, fireproof columns allow the free flow of air through the atrium, their design inspired by 'bamboo wives'[zhufuren], traditional lattice framed bamboo bolsters. In hot and humid weather, these are cooler to sleep on than sheets and pillows. The lightweight form of the ceiling grid shell is reflected in a pool creating an intentionally poetic effect.(Credit: Kyeong-Sik Yoon/KACI International and Shigeru Ban/SBA Architects)

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Golf Digest in USA- World's 100 Greatest Golf Courses

72. HAESLEY NINE BRIDGES


Yeoju-eop, Yeoju-gun, South Korea / 7,256 yards, Par 72

Don't confuse this course with The C. at Nine Bridges. Both have the same owner, but this one was designed by Golfplan's David Dale. Nine Bridges is on Jeju Island; Haesley is close to Seoul. Nine Bridges has revetted bunkers; Haesley has big, bold flashed-sand ones. Nine Bridges has an island green on 18; Haesley has a par 4 with an island fairway and an island green. The par 4 10th, with an island fairway and an island green is the hole backdropped by a mountainside waterfall. Haesley Nine Bridges opened in 2009 and has held the CJ Invitational on the Korean Golf Tour in 2011 through 2013, won twice by tournament host K.J. Choi.

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The New york Times - The 45 Places to Go in 2012

42. South Korea

Is golf's newest hot spot in Asia? South Korea is redefining just how luxurious golf resorts can be. A slew of new private clubs - the kind with six-digit membership fees, designs by celebrity architects and clubhouses that look like modern art museums - have opened recently in the country.

The most prestigious is Haesley Nine Bridges, just outside Seoul, with a clubhouse covered by a huge, sinuous web of wooden beams (it also features one of Jeff Koons's giant balloon toy sculptures).

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Golf course Architecture in USA

Haesley aims to set new standards


Golf course Architecture in USA
28 April 2010

When a firm has designed 22 courses in a market, the 23rd must somehow set itself apart. This was the task facing course architect David Dale and his colleagues at Golfplan, whose 23rd design in South Korea 式 Haesley Nine Bridges 式 opened very quietly late last year.

That's a tough act to follow but Haesley has a sophistication and flair that frankly none of our courses in South Korea have, including Nine Bridges, Dale said. It's sassy and dramatic without ever sacrificing the balance you need to create a world-class experience 式 and it is the 'experience' that sets Haesley apart. The course design, the course conditions and the clubhouse are without peer in South Korea.

Ten years ago, such a statement might have been interpreted as faint praise, but today South Korea is arguably the world's most dynamic golf course market. More projects are being built here, at a faster pace, than anywhere in the world. Haesley Nine Bridges was undertaken specifically to leverage the Nine Bridges brand in the economic centre of that market, Seoul.

Haesley's modernist clubhouse, which, in March 2010, earned a World Architecture Award for designer Yoon Kyeong-sik. The course design is equally high-concept. Dale says the layout was crafted in direct response to its sister design on Jeju. 'There is a concept for each hole at Haesley, and those were informed by the concepts we used at Nine Bridges', Dale explained. 'We adapted these ideas, refined and improved on them.'

At Haesley, there's a 'sky' hole with a horizon green surrounded by bunkers (the fifteenth), a speed slot hole (twelfth), a Cape hole (ninth), an island hole (sixteenth), even, in the tenth, a two-island hole. Dale says he's proud of the way these concepts work on their own, and then together in the context of an 18 hole routing: 'The tenth is a short par four, just 300 metres or so, but hazards surround the fairway and green. It's risk-reward taken to the highest degree,' he said 'However, the 11th hole 式 a 530-metre par five 式features a single central fairway bunker that really serves more as a target. It's wide open. After the tenth, it's a liberating experience.'

'The bunkers are quite grand in scale and different from anything we've done in Korea: with sand flashes as high as two metres. You can stand at the bottom and the lip is over your head!'

Dale worked closely with Marsh Benton, Augusta National's director of agronomy to set a new agronomic standard for South Korea, a country where maintenance can be a puzzle. The chief complicating factor is the country's location in a transition zone 式 a latitude directly between colder climates (suitable for bent and fescue grass species) and warmer climates (where bermuda and paspalum predominate). For decades, the standard in Korea has been zoysia grass, which can survive the heat and cold but rarely produces world-class playing surfaces. Working with JacklinGolf and consultant Jim Connolly, Dale and Benson equipped all 18 greens at Haesley with T-1 bentgrass and Sub-Air systems to allow the superintendent to remove excess water from the green's soil profile and pull oxygen into the root system during rainy, high-stress summer months. Sub-Air, which Benson helped develop in the 1990s, literally pipes oxygen into the root-zone at the superintendent's discretion.

All the greens, plus middle and forward tees also have with sub-grade hydronics. This system of heating and cooling coils is a first for Korea, and Benson brought a high degree of familiarity: a similar system is used to warm the rootzone of the twelfth green at Augusta National.

'There's an aesthetic consideration, as well,' Dale points out. 'There are visual dynamics we cannot achieve without bentgrass. When you frame a bentgrass fairway with bluegrass rough, it feels rich and refined. There's a distinction in growing heights that provides a scale and texture. Because of that definition, that change in colour, it feels comfortable 式 like every fairway occupies its own room. The goal was for Haesley to stand out, and I believe that goal has been met. There's nothing like it in South Korea, or anywhere else.'

Wallpaper in UK

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About an hour away from Seoul, in Yeoju, stands Haesley Clubhouse, an ethereal wooden structure masterminded by Shigeru Ban. As the central feature of Haesley Nine Bridges Golf Club, the airy clubhouse is made up of wooden timbers that resemble blossoming flowers-each pillar has been carved to bind onto another without using any nails.

The structure's grandeur is appropriate : golf is taken extremely seriously in Korea and in a club of premium quality such as Haesley, lifetime membership is rumoured to cost more than KRW 1bn($900,000). Surrounded by rolling greens, the structure houses a restaurant, the Clubhouse Grille, and a spa, where the eponymous signature treatment focuses on keeping the feet hot and head cold to balance the body after a rigorous round of golf. There is also a private hall an bar, which lights up to resemble a sun rising over a village - the literal meaning of 'Haesley'. Outside a state-of-the art hydronics system allows the fairway to stay green all year round.

New Architecture

Japanese architecture magazine

2010.12

Introduced as excellent architecture combining modernity and Korean tradition


New Architecture
Golf Digest in Korea
JUNE 2010

Haesley started new plan to built history and culture.


Golf Digest in Korea
Golf Digest in Korea
January 2011

ClubHouse as Architecture


Golf Digest in Korea