Panther National at Avenir

Every other private golf club community in Palm Beach County looks the same. Mediterranean Revival, Tuscan, Spanish, terracotta roofs over stucco walls, all of it borrowed from the 1920s playbook of Addison Mizner. Panther National looked at that consensus and walked the other way. The first home you see is glass and stone and unbroken horizontal line, set against a 2,400-acre stretch of protected panther habitat that will never be developed. The 17th green sits where a working ranch used to be. The bunkers are filled with sand sourced from Augusta, St. Andrews, Pinehurst, and Pebble Beach. You play all four majors before you reach the turn.

The course is the first Justin Thomas has ever designed. He co-designed it with Jack Nicklaus, who has called the parcel the last buildable piece of premium land in Palm Beach County. Whether that turns out to be true or not, it is fair to say this is Palm Beach's first new luxury golf community in nearly twenty years, and probably its last for another twenty. There is no land left like this.

Panther National sits on 400 acres on the western edge of Avenir, a 4,752-acre master plan rising on the former Vavrus Ranch and developed by Coral Gables-based Landstar Group. Avenir is the most ambitious build to come to Palm Beach County in a generation: nearly 4,000 new homes, a 16,000 square foot resort clubhouse, a working Town Center with 400,000 square feet of retail and 2,000,000 square feet of office space, a planned 300-room hotel, and over 2,400 acres of permanent Everglades restoration. Apex by GL Homes, Regency by Toll Brothers, and DiVosta all build inside Avenir. Panther National is the only modern community among them, and it sets the aesthetic ceiling for the entire master plan.

The architecture is all Max Strang, the Miami firm known for what it calls environmental modernism. Clean lines. Integration with the natural site. Expansive glass. Dramatic indoor-outdoor transitions. Every one of the 218 custom estates is a Strang design. Homes range from 4,100 to nearly 10,000 square feet across fourteen floor plans on three lot sizes (0.30, 0.50, and 1.0 acre). A Tesla partnership integrates solar power and clean energy across the community. Buyers choose Signature Estates ($4.7M, turn-key with Strang interiors) or Custom Homes ($5.25M, full design specification with the architect). Club membership is mandatory at purchase, with a $500,000 initiation.

The man behind all of it is Dominik Senn, a Swiss former alpine ski racer who founded a Zurich sports management firm before turning to real estate. His brief to Nicklaus, Thomas, and Strang was singular: design a modern golf community that looks and plays unlike anything else in Florida. It took two and a half million cubic feet of dirt to build. The result is a place that does not look like Palm Beach County. That is exactly the point.