Pick Your Pleasures at Reynolds Lake Oconee
There’s something downright compelling about a place where you can play a different golf course each day for six days in a row, then spend the seventh day at “rest”—boating, fishing, swimming, waterskiing or whatever else on Georgia’s second-largest lake. But that’s what life is like at Reynolds Lake Oconee. The 4,000-home luxury golf community (formerly known as Reynolds Plantation) covers 10,000 acres along 80 miles of shoreline on 19,000-acre Lake Oconee and attracts a diverse mix of year-round and second-home residents intent on getting the best out of life.
Reynolds got a new owner (MetLife) in 2012 and $40 million worth of enhancements in the years since. The golf courses have received major facelifts, everything from the pedestrian trails to the wellness campus was updated, and even the logo was redesigned to reflect a new, modern community lifestyle.
All of which makes Reynolds an increasingly popular place to live. There are a few condo buildings (although no high-rise buildings or timeshares), but most residents opt for single-family homes that start as low as $200,000. Over 90 percent of the planned 4,200 lots have been sold, but only 60 percent of the homes have been built, so you have ample opportunity to get exactly what you want. You can choose from over 20 models available from approved builders or design your own. For less than $1 million, you can move into a 5,000-square-foot, 4-bedroom, 4.5-bath beauty, complete with elevator, top-grade appliances and finishes, and an additional 2,800 square feet of roofed outdoor-living space—not to mention a dramatic golf course view.
Speaking of golf, it is so good and so plentiful at Reynolds that it’s almost embarrassing. There are six championship courses, designed by leading architects like Jack Nicklaus, Bob Cupp, Tom Fazio, and Rees Jones—each unique and each with its own fully staffed and stocked pro shop and practice facility. You may have seen one of them, the Great Waters Course, when it was featured on the Golf Channel as the home course of Big Break in 2014. With nine holes along the water and some of the most breathtaking views in the area, Great Waters is hard to forget. The National Course, a Tom Fazio design, includes three nines routed through dense hardwood forests, as well as along the lakeshore.
The Creek Club, which opened in 2007, is strictly private, but the other five are also open to guests of the Ritz Carlton, the 251-room lakefront resort and spa at Reynolds. The Landing also allows some daily-fee play. There are three available membership packages, with initiations starting at $20,000, according to Reynolds VP Laurie Cicco. The $35,000 Gold membership gives you unlimited play on five of the courses, and you can add The Creek Club for $30,000 more. Cicco adds, “All memberships include tennis, indoor- and outdoor-pool privileges, the fitness centers, lectures and classes, and access to the Lake Club.”
For golfers serious about improving their scores (and who isn’t?) there is the Reynolds Golf Academy, a state-of-the-art golf learning center on a 16-acre campus adjacent to the Oconee Course. It’s under the direction of well-known instructor Charlie King, director of golf at Reynolds, and offers a wonderfully expansive range, enclosed hitting bays for off-weather days, video technology, short-game areas, classrooms, and dining facilities. You can also take advantage of custom club-fitting and swing analysis at a level generally available only to PGA Tour pros at the Kingdom, the TaylorMade shop on site.
But before there was golf there was the lake, of course, and it gives residents and visitors to Reynolds an immense number of recreational opportunities. There are four full-service marinas, where you can rent everything from kayaks to boats and jet skis if you don’t have your own watercraft or just want to try something different. Reynolds is a fisherman’s heaven, too, with an estimated 433 pounds of fish per acre—double that normally found in other lakes in mid-Georgia. Largemouth bass are the big attraction, but you can haul in bream, crappie, and catfish, too.
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