New name, new hands, a new era unfolding like the first blush of dawn.
At Rancho Santa Fe’s La Valle Coastal Club, the past is giving way to something altogether more golden. Last year, the club saw one of its most remarkable surges in golf and racquet memberships—a feverish anticipation stirring around a reinvention that promises to touch every corner of its being.
The course, the pool, the dining rooms filled with murmuring laughter, the fitness halls where morning light pours in like champagne—all will be renewed, refined. Even the on-site hotel, weary with the weight of time, will be reborn. A $25 million transformation, unfolding in careful phases over the next eighteen months, ensures that the magic is woven seamlessly, without the jarring discord of upheaval.
The metamorphosis began when Meriwether Properties, a real estate investment and development firm, took the reins of the club—once known as Morgan Run—in 2023. With new ownership came a new identity: La Valle. And with La Valle, the promise of a future as lush and sweeping as the fairways themselves.
“This place has always had the bones of something magnificent,” remarked La Valle’s General Manager, Fernando Fry. “It simply needed a steward with vision—and the means to make that vision real.”
But this is no distant, faceless acquisition. There is something intimate about it, something rooted. The 200-acre estate, once touched by the slow decay of years gone indifferent, hums now with the ceaseless rhythm of hammers and saws, stripping the weary bones of a 77-room hotel down to its very studs.
Once, the hotel had been a whisper of former elegance, its grandeur faded beneath the weight of neglect. But time, like fortune, is a fickle mistress, and now the hands of Hannah Gabriel Wells, deft and dreaming, have traced out a vision of renewal.
Three structures will rise where one had languished, their walls embracing space and light, their chambers promising the quiet luxury of the modern age—a place where old ghosts will be exorcized by the crisp gleam of newness.
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Beyond the hotel
Past the manicured hedges and up the grand drive, the clubhouse at La Valle is shedding its past like the final notes of a jazz tune fading into the night. The old, familiar entryway will soon glow with a new lightness—windows thrown wide, fine finishes gleaming under the soft hush of ceiling fans.
Inside, the dining room and bar, once stiff with formality, will melt into something more inviting, a lounge humming with quiet conversation and the clink of highballs.
Nearby, the club’s main dining room will reopen, a refined affair with a view that stretches over a charming little putting course known, in an affectionate nod, as “The Punch Bowl.” Here, children and grown-ups alike will take their shots between laughter and stolen bites of something delicious, the dusk settling in like an old friend.
By year’s end, the transformation will be complete—three nine-hole courses reborn, their greens fresh with the kind of care they had long been denied. Once a patchwork of good intentions and fading grandeur, the fairways now roll effortlessly into the horizon, irrigated, tended, loved.
Membership has swelled as the course has come alive, a testament to the eternal allure of well-cut grass beneath a wide and waiting sky.
Of the 27 holes, 18 have already been reshaped, their bunkers sculpted, their turf refreshed. And soon, the practice facilities will match the grandeur—an expanded range, a vast 12,000-square-foot putting green where the dreamers and the dedicated alike can refine their strokes beneath the sun.
Wandering through it all, Ed Cleary of Root Strategy Group gestures grandly toward the valley, where palm trees stand like sentinels against the vast sky. “The view,” he muses, “is what they all fall in love with.”
And yet, La Valle is more than just its view. The old pool, once a place of languid afternoons, will soon pulse with new purpose—fitness-focused, its edges redrawn in the name of vitality. A second, more playful pool will rise in its place, its shimmering waters overlooking the rhythmic back-and-forth of the racquet courts.
Ah, the racquet courts. Eight for tennis, eight for pickleball, and two for padel—an unfamiliar name, but not for long. The first private club in San Diego to introduce the sport, La Valle has thrown open the doors to a game that’s part tennis, part pickleball, part squash—a blur of motion on a blue-turf court, where walls aren’t barriers but allies, the ball ricocheting
La Valle offers memberships golf, racquet and social memberships. To learn more visit lavallecoastalclub.com/membership
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