Beau Chêne

The place

Thirty-six holes, a marina on the Tchefuncte, and seventeen miles of road that lead nowhere but home.

Two 18-hole championship courses — the Oak and the Magnolia — a country club with a full-service restaurant, indoor and outdoor tennis, a pool complex, and a marina with direct river access and 140 slips. The river frontage is the part people underestimate until they see it: the Tchefuncte running dark and slow under a canopy that has been growing since before the community existed. That's the name — beau chêne, beautiful oak. Established in 1974 between Mandeville and Madisonville, it grew from 73 property owners at the first annual meeting in 1975 to more than 1,500 today, and it runs its own water and sewer. Fifty years of building means fifty years of architecture — Acadian, traditional, contemporary, custom — which is why it reads as a neighborhood rather than a catalog. And part of the Oak course sits on the grounds of Pineland Park, a turn-of-the-century riverside resort whose later owner had a 103-foot yacht built in Boston to ferry guests in. Some of those oaks watched the whole thing happen.