Farhad Heydari

A private club’s new public offering opens up the legends of Scotland’s Golf Coast.  Scotland’s East Lothian region is rightly referred to as the country’s Golf Coast. The windswept stretch of Caledonia—located about a half hour east of Edinburgh—is home to more than 20 courses, including such treasures as Muirfield, Gullane, and the world’s third […]

A one-of-a-kind Corsican retreat introduces a novel golf experience.   Even among the many villa and farmhouse getaways in southern Europe, Domaine de Murtoli stands apart. The resort, which opened 20 years ago on the mountainous French island of Corsica, offers an incomparable Mediterranean countryside experience to its few guests, who stay in 17 homesteads […]

Hamming It Up The latest whimsical creation from London’s Firmdale Hotels opened in June in the city’s Soho neighborhood, a short walk from Piccadilly Circus. Ham Yard Hotel (www.hamyardhotel.com)—the company’s eighth property in London—is expansive by Firmdale standards, with 91 guest rooms, 24 apartments, and more than a dozen boutiques. Firmdale properties (which also include the Crosby […]

With its rugged wadis, ancient-fort-studded mountains, and 1,300 miles of coastline, the Sultanate of Oman has long attracted adventurous travelers, especially those from Europe. Like the United Arab Emirates, its neighbor to the northwest, Oman has recently started buttressing its natural and cultural attractions with new resorts and developments. But the country’s relatively low-key projects—which […]

Before the Greek debt crisis, in the rosy glow that followed the 2004 Olympic Games in Athens, a self-made shipping magnate named Vassilis Constantakopoulos began to realize a long-held dream. As far back as the 1980s, Constantakopoulos began acquiring land in his native Messenia, a historically significant region of the southwest Peloponnese. He eventually decided […]

Italy’s riches are innumerable, as any aficionado of art, architecture, automobiles, food, or wine will surely attest. But when it comes to golf, Italians have never embraced the sport with the same gusto they reserve for a Michelangelo or a Maserati. Recently, however, the emergence and growing popularity of Italian professional golfers Matteo Man­assero and […]

With only a handful of courses scattered across its parched, garrigue-carpeted landscape, the Mediterranean island of Cyprus is not the first place that comes to mind as a warm-weather golfing destination for Europeans. Overshadowed by Spain and even Morocco and Tunisia, this divided 3,572-square-mile island—Cyprus is split between the Greek-controlled south and Turkish-occupied north—has a […]

Most of Europe’s elite golf courses are clustered in the British Isles and, to a lesser extent, the Iberian Peninsula. Like its joie-de-vivre-centric counterpart Italy, France has always been an underachiever when it comes to this particular leisure pursuit. But the Gallic golfing landscape is not without its gems, most notably the forested and mysterious […]

Great Britain’s colonial legacy in India is a controversial subject, but few would question the infrastructural contributions the British made to the subcontinent—namely the 28,000 miles of railroad track that was laid by the early 1900s. A century later, the rail system is one of the largest in the world, with some 7,500 stations and […]

Of all the things that London seems to be short on—sunshine and dispassionate cabbies, to name two—gilded shopping byways certainly are not among them. From Notting Hill’s Westbourne Grove and Brompton Cross in Knightsbridge to Belgravia’s Motcomb Street and the burgeoning Shoreditch Triangle, avenues lined with fashionable boutiques can be found in seemingly every corner […]