The two courses are world-class. That has long been the consensus.
Now it’s time to get the accommodations up to snuff.
The owners of Mid Pines Inn & Golf Club and Pine Needles Lodge & Golf Club — sibling properties in the Sandhills of North Carolina with a pair of esteemed Donald Ross designs — announced this week that they have entered a joint venture with one of the golf industry’s leading names in hospitality.
Under the partnership with Marine & Lawn Hotels & Resorts, the hotels at Mid Pines and Pine Needles will undergo major renovations. The golf operations will remain as they are, but Marine & Lawn will take over the management of both hotels and their food and beverage programs.
“This is an exiting initiative for our resorts,” Kelly Miller, president and CEO of the group that owns Mid Pines and Pine Needles, said in a release that accompanied the news. “We’ve needed for some time to upgrade our lodging facilities as well as our food and beverage, and Marine & Lawn is an ideal partner for us.”
Among avid golfers, there has never been a question about the quality of the courses at Mid Pines and Pine Needles, which are situated in Southern Pines, N.C., about 10 minutes east of Pinehurst Resort. Both properties were conceived in the 1920s as demand for golf surged in the Sandhills region, with Ross, a towering figure of the Golden Age, brought in to handle the course designs.
In 1953, Warren Bell and his wife Peggy Kirk Bell, a charter member of the LPGA Tour, began operating Pine Needles. Six years later, the couple bought the property, which has remained in the family ever since. In 1994, the Bells took on partners to acquire Mid Pines. The entire enterprise is now owned by the Miller, McGowan and Tharani families, who also own Southern Pines Golf Club, another Ross design, less than four miles away.
Over the years, Mid Pines and Pine Needles have been fixtures of Top 100 lists, with the latter having an especially rich tournament pedigree as the host of four U.S. Women’s Opens and a U.S. Senior Women’s Open. In 2013, Mid-Pines underwent a widely praised restoration by the architect Kyle Franz, who did the same for Pine Needles four years later. Even as the golf shined, though, accommodations at both properties remained in a state of suspended animation, imbued with throwback charm but also shot through with creaky-floorboard atmospherics that called to mind the ghostly inns of “Scooby-Doo.”
None of this was lost on ownership. Over the years, Miller said, the families have had conversations with multiple potential partners, always with the requirement that the families remain involved and that any changes would respect the “history and tradition” of the properties.
“In talking with potential partners over the last 10 years, almost all of them said, ‘We’re going to tear it down and build it back up,’ and you never know,” Miller said, referring to the Mid Pines Inn, which was designed by the noted architect Aymar Embury II. “That hotel was not going to be torn down on our family’s watch.”
In Marine & Lawn, Miller said the families had finally found the right partner, one that specializes in iconic golf properties. A division of AJ Capital, which manages more than $5.4 billion in real estate investments through the United States and the U.K., Marine & Lawn has made its mark in the game by acquiring and restoring hotels near famous courses. A golf portfolio that began with the Rusacks St Andrews has grown to include the likes of Marine North Berwick, and Marine Troon and Dornoch State in Scotland, along with two marquee properties in North Ireland: the Slieve Donard near Royal County Down and Portrush Delphi, alongside 2025 Open Championship host Royal Portrush.
The partnership with Mid Pines and Pine Needles marks Marine & Lawn’s first hotel venture in the U.S. The renovation work will begin this wall at Mid Pines, which will be shut down for six to eight months. Plans call for golf operations to continue uninterrupted throughout the hotel renovations.
