Arizona Biltmore Golf Club: Estates Course

The Estates Course occupies the site of the original Adobe Course, laid out in 1928 by William P. "Billy" Bell for William Wrigley Jr. and opened in 1929 as one of the first courses in Phoenix. In 2023 Tom Lehman led a ground-up rebuild that reopened the layout under the Estates name while retaining the historic routing at the heart of the Arizona Biltmore resort.

The Arizona Biltmore Golf Club's Adobe Course stands as one of the oldest golf courses in Phoenix and one of the founding landmarks of Arizona's resort golf tradition. Built beginning in 1926 and opening in 1929 — the same year the Arizona Biltmore Hotel received its first guests — the course represents the original vision of desert resort golf before Arizona emerged as a national destination. William Wrigley Jr., the chewing gum magnate who purchased the resort shortly before it opened, commissioned the course as a complement to the hotel's signature Frank Lloyd Wright-influenced architecture. William P. "Billy" Bell designed the Adobe Course, drawing on the vocabulary he had developed working alongside his mentor George C. Thomas on celebrated California designs including Riviera Country Club, Bel-Air Country Club, and Los Angeles Country Club. Bell brought to the Sonoran Desert the same understanding of strategic bunkering that would come to define the work of both men — deep, defined sand traps positioned to test approach angles and reward players who chose the correct line from the tee.

These became known as "Bell Bunkers," and at the Adobe Course they originally defined every approach sequence in ways that made the routing both fair and demanding. The Arizona Biltmore Hotel's connections to Frank Lloyd Wright, who served as a design consultant during its construction and whose textile block aesthetic influenced the entire resort complex, gave the property a cultural cachet that attracted presidents, celebrities, and business leaders through most of the twentieth century. Irving Berlin wrote "White Christmas" while staying at the Biltmore in 1941. Marilyn Monroe, Clark Gable, and multiple American presidents visited during the resort's golden era. The golf course served as the centerpiece of the outdoor amenity program throughout that period. By the late 1970s, however, the Adobe Course had fallen badly out of condition.

Decades of accumulated tree planting had crowded the fairways and removed the strategic value of Bell's original bunkering. Most of the fairway bunkers had disappeared entirely, and the greens had been reduced to small, undifferentiated surfaces that bore little resemblance to Bell's original design intent. What had once been one of Arizona's most admired layouts had become, in the assessment of renovation architect Forrest Richardson, "mostly lame holes lined with a dense canopy of way too many trees." Richardson, who had studied under Arthur Jack Snyder and developed an Arizona-based practice focused on historic restoration, undertook a comprehensive master plan for the Adobe Course beginning in the early 2000s. A $4-million renovation completed in 2004 removed many of the encroaching trees, rebuilt Bell's famous strategic bunkering, and restored the greens to sizes and contours that honored the original design intent. Richardson's approach treated the 1920s character of the course — parkland rather than desert, irrigated and lush rather than naturalistic — as something worth preserving rather than updating. The result returned the Adobe Course to a condition closer to what Bell had intended when he designed it.

A subsequent renovation in 2022-2023 addressed agronomic improvements to fairway and green surfaces while continuing the work of restoring Bell's bunkering character. The project confirmed the Adobe Course's position as one of Arizona's most historically significant public-accessible golf experiences. Its nearly century-long continuous operation on the same routing — adjacent to a hotel that has itself been continuously recognized as one of America's great resort properties — makes it a landmark in the history of American resort golf. The Biltmore Golf Club today offers 36 holes in total, with both the Adobe Course and the Links Course accessible to resort guests and public players. The Adobe's 1929 vintage, its Bell design pedigree, and its place within the Biltmore's cultural history combine to make it a genuinely irreplaceable piece of Arizona golf's founding narrative.