"It was on the ocean when I got here, and you guys were still losing money!"
That's Tony Chateauvert, recalling a question someone once asked him about how hard it could possibly be to run a golf course on the Atlantic. He's been the general manager and head professional at the Palm Beach Par 3 Golf Course since 2010, and the line has stuck with him because it captures something true about this particular stretch of South Ocean Boulevard: proximity to water has never been the hard part here. Making people want to come back is.
The course sits at 2345 South Ocean Boulevard, a few properties down from the gates of Mar-a-Lago, on 39 acres of land wedged between the Atlantic and the Intracoastal Waterway. It is owned by the Town of Palm Beach, which bought it from the Phipps family in 1973 and kept it open to the public while condos and hotels went up along the same stretch of A1A through the following decades. For most of that time, it was busy because it was cheap and oceanfront, not because anyone particularly loved playing it. There wasn't even a restaurant.
That's the part of the story most visitors never get, because the version they experience today is a genuinely well-run, frequently ranked golf course with a packed tee sheet and a restaurant that outperforms most standalone dining rooms on the island. The distance between those two versions is the actual story, and it says something about how Palm Beach works that has nothing to do with real estate prices.
A Course Built On Someone Else's Business Plan
The layout itself dates to 1961, designed by Dick Wilson and his apprentice Joe Lee. It stayed largely unchanged for decades, a solid but unglamorous municipal track that locals used because the alternative was driving to a private club they didn't belong to. The turning point came in 2009, when World Golf Hall of Fame member Raymond Floyd offered to redesign the course for free, simply because he loved the property. Floyd reworked the elevations and green complexes, added strategic bunkering, and left the routing between two lakes, the Intracoastal, and the ocean largely intact. Chateauvert arrived the following year, after the redesign was already finished, and inherited a golf course that finally played like it looked.
What he didn't inherit was a business. The clubhouse that opened in January 2014, a two-story Key West style building with a pro shop downstairs and a restaurant on the second floor, was the first real hospitality investment the property had seen. The restaurant, Al Fresco, is run by a Palm Beach restaurant family that had already been serving the island for years under two earlier names, Renato's and Pizza al Fresco, before taking over the clubhouse space.
The results, as tallied in a PGA.com profile of Chateauvert published in early 2024 covering the 2023 season, are the part locals rarely see broken out in one place:
| Metric | 2010 (Chateauvert's start) | 2023 (most recently reported year) |
|---|---|---|
| Rounds played | Not tracked as a record | 55,000 rounds, a new high for the club |
| Pro shop sales | About $40,000 a year | More than $880,000 a year |
| Lesson revenue | Roughly half of the 2023 total | $550,000 a year |
| Al Fresco restaurant revenue | Not yet open | $6.5 million a year |
Those aren't numbers a municipal golf course typically produces without either raising prices sharply or restricting access to members. This one did neither. It got more popular by getting better at hospitality, which is a duller explanation than most turnaround stories but a more accurate one.
Who Actually Plays It Now
For years, the joke about the Palm Beach Par 3 was that its average customer had a bus pass. Chateauvert has said as much himself, noting that early twilight and singles programs he introduced drew a crowd whose average age was around 80. What changed the club's trajectory wasn't chasing a different demographic on paper. It was making the course a place people in their twenties and thirties wanted to be on a Tuesday evening.
That shift shows up in two figures Chateauvert has pointed to directly: the club's growth in recent years has come largely from golfers aged 22 to 35, many of them starting careers in West Palm Beach, Jupiter, or Fort Lauderdale and coming to the Par 3 to play fast and gather afterward. And 62 percent of the golfers on the course now are women, a ratio that would be unusual at almost any private club in the county and is closer to what you'd expect from a well-run public range than a historic muni.
Context helps here. The National Golf Foundation counts roughly 700 par-3 courses nationwide, present in every state but one, with California and Florida holding the largest concentrations. Most of those courses exist to teach beginners the short game cheaply. Very few of them are ranked by Golf Digest, and this one has been named the best par-3 course in the country twice, with Golf Magazine ranking it above the celebrated par-3 layout at Augusta National. That comparison gets repeated often enough on golf forums and review sites that it's become part of the course's identity locally, the kind of detail residents mention to guests almost reflexively.
What Eighteen Holes Actually Costs
The course plays 18 holes ranging from 81 to 211 yards, with three sets of tees on every hole, which is enough variation to keep a low-single-digit handicap honest without making a beginner miserable. Green fees have historically started in the mid-$30s for non-residents and topped out in the low $60s for 18 holes, with reduced rates for residents and juniors. Cart and rental club fees run separately and are modest by island standards. Rates shift with the season and the Town periodically adjusts them, so anyone planning a round should check current pricing directly through the course's own tee time page rather than relying on last year's number.
What that buys, regardless of the exact figure on a given week, is two holes that run along the Intracoastal and two along the open Atlantic, on some of the most valuable oceanfront acreage in the country, without a membership fee, an initiation deposit, or a sponsor. On an island where waterfront access is otherwise measured in linear feet of private seawall, that arrangement is unusual enough to be worth noticing.
The Best Nineteenth Hole Is Upstairs
Al Fresco sits on the second floor of the clubhouse, with a wraparound porch that gets tarped down on windy days and a bar that stays busy well past the last tee time. It serves breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and it does that well enough to have become a genuine restaurant destination for people who never touch a club. The porch view over the course, the Intracoastal, and the Atlantic beyond it is the kind of thing that would carry a much higher price tag at almost any other address on the island.
For anyone extending the morning into a full outing, Worth Avenue is a short drive north, the kind of stretch where the flagship Lilly Pulitzer store and a run of design galleries make for an easy walk after a round. It's a natural second stop for residents who treat golf as the start of a Saturday rather than the whole plan.
None of this changes what Palm Beach real estate costs or how the market moves. But it says something about how the island actually functions day to day, where a genuinely public amenity on genuinely private-caliber land became more popular by getting more welcoming, not more exclusive. That's a rarer story here than the one about rising prices, and it's worth knowing if you already call this place home.
If you're weighing a move to the island, or already live here and are curious what your property is worth in a market shaped by details like this one, the Greg Forest Group is glad to talk through it. Request a private market consultation whenever you're ready.
