Just
outside the don’t-blink-or-you’ll-miss-it settlement of Haven, Wisconsin, County Road FF
ends. Here a motorist has two choices: Turn onto a two-lane highway surrounded
by board-flat farmland or continue straight ahead through a line of grassy
dunes, the opening marked by an inconspicuous stone sign.
To
choose the latter option is to be transported into another world—one of tumbling
golf holes, ragged sand blowouts, howling winds and a Lake
Michigan backdrop seemingly as big as an ocean.
Welcome
to Whistling Straits, site of the 2004 PGA Championship and the 2007 U.S. Senior Open. Who would expect to
find a world-class golf complex amid such unassuming Midwestern
surroundings?
Whistling
Straits and its sister facility, Blackwolf Run, have given the resort village of Kohler an unlikely but prominent spot on
golf’s world map. Their success reflects the savvy and hard work that have made
the Kohler Co. one of the U.S.’s largest privately held businesses, an empire
whose products include kitchen and bath fixtures, engines and generators,
furniture and accessories, cabinetry and tile.
Hospitality
officially became a division of the Kohler Co. in 1981, when the American Club,
a former dormitory for workers, was completely restored and re-opened as a
luxury hotel overseen by Herb Kohler. Today the red-brick, Tudor-style building
houses 237 rooms and suites, each featuring a Kohler whirlpool bath and various
other products from the company catalog. Along the hallways, black-and-white
photographs chronicle the club’s heritage.
Five
dining facilities run the gamut from formal and romantic (the cozy Immigrant
Room) to casual and raucous (the Horse & Plow pub, where tabletops are
constructed of boards that once made up the dorm’s basement-level bowling
alley). Next door is another showcase for Kohler bath products, the luxurious
Kohler Waters Spa.
A
spa treatment might be in order after the inevitable pains of playing 72 Pete
Dye golf holes. The first of those designs, Blackwolf Run (named for a
19th-century Winnebago Indian chief), opened in 1988 on a lush slice of
hardwood-lined meadow bisected by the Sheboygan River. Dye added a third nine in 1989 and
a fourth in ’90; the courses were then restructured into two 18-hole layouts,
River and Meadow
Valleys.
