For the past couple of years, a South Korean conglomerate has been hoping to build a golf community called Dream Island in, of all places, Azerbaijan. And now it appears that the dream is going to come true.
Dream Island will take shape on 750 acres in Bina, a suburb of Baku, Azerbaijan’s capital and largest city (population: 2 million). The community will consist of villas, townhouses, and condos, a hotel, an international school, a shopping area and what is most likely the nation’s first golf course, certainly its first 18-hole golf course.
Dream Island will have one other attraction of note: it’ll be the home of a “presidential protocol center,” a sort of Camp David for Azerbaijan’s president, Ilham Aliyev.
No, he doesn’t golf. But he’s said to be taking lessons.
The community is being developed by Kolon Glotech, the sports and leisure subsidiary of Kolon Group. In South Korea, Kolon Glotech manufactures specialty fabrics and artificial turf and sells BMWs and Rolls-Royces. It owns hotels, resorts, fitness centers and several golf courses, including Mauna Ocean Golf Resort in Kyongju and Yong-won Country Club in Jinhae City. Two of its golf properties have David Leadbetter golf academies, and Leadbetter may be enlisted to open one at Dream Island.
Kolon Group also hosts the Kolon Korean Open, which is played at the Perry Dye-designed golf course at Woo Jeong Hills Country Club in Cheonan City. And when it came to hiring a designer for the course at Dream Island, the company stayed in the family: it selected Cynthia Dye-McGarey, Perry Dye’s cousin. She and her husband, O’Brien McGarey, are the principals of Denver, Colorado-based Dye Designs Group.
Kolon is co-developing Dream Island with Azerbaijan’s largest conglomerate, a Baku-based food-products manufacturer called Azersun Holding Group. The partners plan to break ground on the golf course this summer.
Baku doesn’t much resemble the rest of Azerbaijan, and the prevailing image of it is outdated. Rising oil prices have made Baku a rich, cosmopolitan city, and last year Lonely Planet named it the eighth-best party town in the world. The Planet called it “an oasis of excess in an otherwise fairly traditional Muslim nation.”
Who knew?