It’s tempting to arrive at the Shawnee Inn and Golf Resort on the Delaware River, avail yourself of a self-guided tour — that’s a compliment, because it’s a friendly, laid-back place — and, after several hours or a few days, roll down the road, thinking that change must come slowly to such a peaceful, 98-year-old property.
Yes,Shawneeis a place that revels in a rich and storied past, with historic black-and-white golf photos (of the likes of Sam Snead, Dwight Eisenhower and Jackie Gleason, taken on its premises) lining the spacious hallways of its 80-room inn, but if you peek inside, lift the duvet, there’s change afoot. In this case, appearances are about as deceptive as those A.W. Tillinghast-designed greens that left us scratching our heads after a day of golf at Shawnee.
What has been taking shape, just out of view, is the formation of a coherent vision and the initial steps to update a resort – if not its 27 holes of golf – that wants to retain its pastoral, by-the-lazy (but occasionally raging) river identity while making an inspired appeal to travelers (and golfers) who think they need to board a plane to find a fully amenitized, memorable destination.
“We all knew Shawnee was going to go through a renaissance,” says Pete Kirkwood, 38, a member of the second generation of the family that has owned the resort since 1977. “We knew we had to scrape away the accretions of many years to discover the gem in the middle of the building. The question is, what would be the vocabulary, the vernacular, of the renaissance, the unifying principle that would make everything make sense together.”
Kirkwood’s sense of how Shawnee could move forward but stay connected to its past came as an epiphany, albeit one that was shaped over months and years by his own accidental architecture-and-design studies and his family’s global migrations and travels.
Kirkwood and his wife, Liz, had lived in northern California, taking special note of the American Arts and Crafts-style homes in Berkeley. They traveled to southern California to see other houses,including iconic homes designed by Greene & Greene. As they did, Pete gained further appreciation for the Arts and Crafts design aesthetic, an offshoot of the British movement that flourished at the turn of the 20th century but still resonates a hundred years later what with its emphasis on craftsmanship and keeping with local landscape and natural surroundings.
Meanwhile, two generations of Kirkwoods had long traveled to the Far East and Pete’s three brothers make their homes there. Those familial ties to the Pacific Rim as well as outright Asian design influences, Pete believed, could be incorporated into an Arts and Crafts aesthetic. And it would leave room for other complementary influences ranging from Gustav Stickley to Frank Lloyd Wright.
“Arts and Crafts is more than an aesthetic, it’s a philosophy,” says Kirkwood. “It’s very much tied to nature.”
Returning to Shawnee about three and a half years ago, Pete experienced a “Eureka!” moment when he began to consider the sophisticated lifestyle preferences of travelers from Shawnee’s core markets: New York and Philadelphia. ”The zeitgeist is all about getting back to nature, simplicity, to being more honest about our relationship with the world.”
So, with the vision and direction clear that a new aesthetic could be embraced, the resort’s initial foray has been to design rooms, furniture and furnishings, which present a visitor with a cleaner, updated-but-still authentic Shawnee experience. Working with Amish craftsman in an off-the-grid factory in Ohio, the Kirkwoods began commissioning chairs, desks, sofas, bedsteads, ottomans and cabinetry — about 20 pieces in all — each with a proprietary ShawneeCraft logo and a structural sturdiness that recalls Stickley and California Mission. So far, they have furnished an 1,100-square-foot hospitality suite that overlooks river and golf course, two cottages and six suites (known as The Legacy Collection) including one in the inn.
In line with expectations, Shawnee’s prices rise for the premium rooms. Whereas a standard suite in the inn may be $229 in season, a suite in a cottage would cost $600. The refurbished room in the inn would be $300. The rate at which other rooms are refurbished will be no small measure of how the traveling public embraces the new aesthetic.
Shawnee Inn, Golf & Brew
Applying a holistic approach, the Kirkwoods – Pete and his mother, Ginny — saw easily enough how an organic, natural philosophy could be extended to cuisine, and their spa’s services and treatments, but also (with some imagination) to the golf course and another of Pete’s pet projects.
While still a student at Williams College in northeast Massachusetts, Pete began cultivating an interest in microbrews by home brewing his own beer. Having a giant, seasonally used, indoor ice rink on Shawnee’s premises meant the Kirkwoods could retrofit a structure to create a microbrewery of their own. A year ago, Pete Kirkwood hired a brewmaster, Leo Bongiorno, to direct the project. Now, needing only a license for production and “to connect a few pipes,” Kirkwood says he’s a few months, if not weeks, away from quaffing ShawneeCraft brews.
He and Bongiorno expect ShawneeCraft Brewing Company to offer products with a stout Belgian influence and some imaginative hallmarks: 750-milliliter bottles with champagne-style corks, and even a sampling that’s aged in 30 Kentucky bourbon casks they procured.
Playing to the high-minded and classically trained, Pete developed a Latin logo for his beer and ShawneeCraft brand: “Fidelis in naturem, in artem fidelis.” Translated, that’s “True to nature; true to the craft.”
When he starts talking about fermented hops, however, Pete seems less the creative visionary who uses terms like “vernacular” and “zeitgeist” than collegiate beer enthusiast. ”We’re not going to name it ‘Dog Spit’ or ’Moose Drool,’” he says. “We don’t want gimmicks. We want it handcrafted, super-high quality.”
Though Pete seems fully capable of enunciating it, he would surely embrace the kind of critical appraisal for ShawneeCraft beer that has long been paid to Shawnee’s 27 holes.
Yes, golf is what initially set us on the trail of the inn with the Indian name that’s a short canoe trip from the Delaware Water Gap. If you’re traveling (by car) out of New York, north Jersey or other suburbs, Shawnee, on the edge of the Poconos’ eastern slope is, paradoxically, both the nearest far point, and the furthest near point. The resort, founded in 1911, is just minutes north of the Marshall’s Creek exit on Interstate 80. Rico, my co-founder here at Styled to a Tee (and aspiring F-1 driver that he is), managed to make it in about 70 minutes from the George Washington Bridge in upper Manhattan. Even if you don’t own a copy of24 Hours at LeMans, it’s the short side of 90 minutes from Manhattan and the northern New Jersey suburbs.
A primary lure is, in fact, 27 holes, including an original 18 by Tillinghast, said to be his first design. All but three of the golf holes are actually located on an island, as the Delaware forks and a good-sized side channel, the Bennekill, elbows its way around the island. Where the golf course routing crosses the river — golfers cross by temporary bridge that is ritually removed each winterand ceremoniously re-installed each spring– the Bennekill is just about 90 yards wide. That’s an almost perfect distance of hazard for the two par threes that span the waterway: No. 2 on the outward Red course, and No. 7, almost all carry, on the inward Blue nine.
(I’m going to pass the keyboard at this point to Rico, since he took me to the cleaners on our Nassau, winning front, back and overall. He even managed a disproportionate share of the exotic wagers, including last to lose a ball when I got lazy on the short par-four 17th hole — the 8th on the Blue — and blocked it into unpassable swamp. As a final insult, he had negotiated a clause that we disclose the outcome on Styled to a Tee.)
Rico? You there? Or are you out spending the winnings?
I’m here. Just giving our readers a pause to alert them to the change in writing styles. After your ornate descriptions I can simply say I’m a big fan of Shawnee as well. The design of the cottages, with killer bathrooms — you forgot to mention they were five-point (a term I wasn’t familiar with but represents the number of separated facilities in the bathroom) – comfortably large bedrooms, and air-conditioners that could be mistaken for works of art.
But if I had two young children like you have, I’d think the fun of the inn is having them scooting up and down those hallways and relaxing in Shawnee’s steamy indoor pool. Shawnee hooked me instantly with the classic photos you spoke of. I mean, if Shawnee is good for Dwight Eisenhower, it’s good for me. Same goes for Snead, Jackie Gleason, Bob Hope and Arnold Palmer. If there were a bible for vintage golf style, those four could be prophets.
The Gleason photos, candids of him entertaining on the Shawnee golf course, are especially interesting because I probably belong to the small group of people under the age of 50 who actually attended Gleason’s Inverrary Classic outside Fort Lauderdale in the early 1970s. Those vintage photos that celebrate Shawnee’s golf pedigree — Snead, for instance, was Shawnee’s touring pro — are quite a testimonial, and constitute an archive that probably rivals a few of the grand resorts of the mid-South.
Nostalgic reverie aside, on the early November day we played, the Shawnee golf course was in immaculate shape. More impressive yet, there were a steady guard of attendants making sure it stayed that way. From blowing the fall leaves that are a particular bane of late-season golfers into a collectible area, to repairing divots on tee boxes, to the more mundane maintenance of the sod, I might have thought we had come at the dawn of high season instead of mid-autumn.
The White/Waring nine holes were closed, so Robert and I played the Red/Worthington to the Blue/Tillinghast. Our aim was to experience the course in full, employing all clubs at our disposal, so we played from the back tees, the Red-Blue combination stretching 6,800 yards, and paid for it with inflated scores.
But for the additional strokes, we did appreciate what Tilly the Terror intended. Parkland golf at its finest, bringing Mother Nature into his designs, with straightforward holes that are still pleasing to the eye, but with approach shots made more difficult by the occasional giant willow or maple and — first-timers beware — those fiendishly deceptive greens.
The putting surface at the Blue course’s 441-yard par-4 first hole, our 10th, was oddly diabolical with the pin positioned on the ridge line that runs up the right side of the green. After my best drive of the day, Robert and I both reached in regulation, Robert’s ball 20 feet below the hole, mine 15 feet above. I could bore you with what happened next but suffice it to say we both left with sixes on our card, four putts a piece. It can be a very cruel game.
Since we haven’t played much golf together this year — a perverse inverse relation to maintaining a golf website – we had a lot of pent-up who-was-going-to-take-whom-to-the-woodshed trash talk going on. Suffice it to say the course won, Robert came in third and was left to ponder why he negotiated so poorly on the first tee.
Shawnee is clearly long enough to have hosted both the PGA Championship (1938, when Paul Runyan defeated Snead, 8 and 7, in match play) and the NCAA Championship (1967, won by Hale Irwin), albeit in an era when staging such events wasn’t strictly a function of massive crowd logistics, sponsor pavilions pawning promo products and guaranteed perennial sunshine.
While Shawnee is long, it’s also forgiving enough to challenge a range of skills. The par-three 7th hole on the Blue (our 16th) that plays back across the Bennekill was playing 165 yards from the back tees, but to a large, receptive green. Whereas I generally try to muscle my way around a course, standing on that tee, looking at all that water, I decided to throttle down and hit a three-quarter 5-iron. The reward: eight feet from the pin. The look on Robert’s face as I closed out our bet…priceless. If the MasterCard production team had been there, I might have made the putt for birdie. Oh well.
(For that, Rico, I’m commandeering the keypad.)
Although we played only 18, Shawnee’s campus compactly combines an awful lot of golf. In addition to the 27 holes, the Tillinghast Golf Academy has a menu of offerings, including clinics, junior lessons and multi-day camps. Most impressively, Shawnee opened a Tom Doak-designed approach course in 2006. Commissioning an architect of Doak’s rapidly rising stature was a coup, and with nine holes ranging from 40 to 135 yards, and a variety of swales, bunkers and collection areas, it would accommodate both hard-core short-game practice, or a family foursome with a few beginners.
Doak,who moved to the top of his profession with his heralded course design work on the Oregon coast, tipped his cap to Tillinghast by modeling the greens and bunkers after those at Winged Foot, Baltusrol and San Francisco Golf Club, all Tillinghast designs. Though it was closed when we visited, the approach course is lighted and, when open, tee times run as late as 11 p.m.
Though Kirkwood didn’t mention it, Doak’s design philosophy, with its emphasis on natural environment and landscape (on grand display above the Pacific Ocean), might be considered a golfy extension of what the family intends for the property. In keeping with the approach, Pete Kirkwood said there’s some discussion about returning to a routing of Tillinghast’s original 18, which the resort had gotten away from as original holes were interspersed with the newer nine, which is credited to Bill Diddle and Fred Waring.
When I first passed through Shawnee some years ago, I recall a scruffy, unkempt range. That may have been the mid, or late, 1990s and concerns may have been with a post-flood refurbishing. The range, rebuilt in 2006, is well groomed and with a set of defined targets is quite an upgrade. With aTillinghast Golf Academyfor instruction located at the other end, Shawnee’s golf offering for the destination-minded would appear complete. — Robert Lohrer and Rico Williams
