GolfTravelReviews: The Reviews "The Pinehurst Area: Cradle of American Golf"

Home Sweet Home at The Pine Crest Inn

Remember your favorite chair that your mother wanted to give to charity? You wouldn’t dare let it go. Sure it was a bit shopworn but it was so comfortable. Weren’t those visits to your grandmother wonderful? You felt so at home, and you couldn’t wait for those home-cooked meals, especially grandma’s apple pies that came fresh out of the oven.

The intimate Pine Crest Inn

The Pine Crest Inn in the center of the Village of Pinehurst is as close to home away from home as you could find in the Sandhills, or anywhere else for that matter. If you’re looking for a sleek, cookie cutter hotel with a high sheen and a low level of personal intimacy, then the Pine Crest Inn is not for you. But if you like a place where guests sip drinks at sundown on the front porch, where meals are served by a staff who greet you as familiarly as family, and where the rooms have down pillows and floors that creak when you walk across them, then the Pine Crest Inn for you is as sure a bet as a tap-in putt.

The Pine Crest Inn has been nestling under the pines of the village since it opened in 1913. The great Donald Ross owned it from 1921 until his death in 1948. By 1961, the inn had fallen onto hard times. Robert Barrett bought it out of receivership and it has been in the Barrett family ever since.

"I used to come to Pinehurst regularly with my father to play golf," said the 85-year-old Barrett, a native of Pennsylvania and a former editor of the Erie (Pa.) Times. "I didn’t know a thing about running a hotel but I learned that the key is to treat visitors warmly. We get 80% return visitors."

"Chipping" in Mr. B's Lounge at Pine Crest Inn

The folksy Barrett started a quirky tradition at the Pine Crest that is as well recognized as Mr. B’s Lounge and piano bar, the inn’s popular small pine-walled watering hole. In front of the hearth in the lobby is a foam and wooden "easel" with a hole in the middle. Guests using a chipping club provided by the inn are invited to chip from off the thin rug to the hole. During the ’99 Open, a number of the players became fiercely competitive at this practice, sending chip shots hearthward from all the way across the bar room. So far as anyone knows, Ben Crenshaw holds the record for consecutive hole-outs, an astounding 10!

Barrett explains how the lobby chipping got started. "I became friends with Lionel Callaway, who invented the Callaway scoring system. One night I met him at the hotel and we came up with this idea that it would be fun to chip, so we built this wooden frame and covered it. People apparently like it as much as we did."

For more information and reservations at the Pine Crest Inn , call 1-910-295-6121.

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