La Licorne

The Château de Raray is one of the most cinematically famous estates in France — Jean Cocteau filmed Beauty and the Beast here in 1946, using the château's extraordinary Renaissance hunting arcade, lined with stone sculptures of deer and hounds, as the Beast's domain. The golf course that occupies these grounds inherits all of that atmosphere: playing among formal French gardens, ancient woodland, and the château's distinctive stone architecture gives La Licorne a setting that few courses anywhere in Europe can rival. The unicorn of the course's name is drawn directly from the château's heraldic iconography.

The Oise département sits in the gentle rolling farmland and forest north of Paris, roughly an hour from the capital, part of the broader Picardy landscape where the terrain is open but quietly dramatic. The regional golf scene draws heavily from Parisian day-trippers and weekenders, and La Licorne fits that mold — a course where the journey through the estate feels as deliberate as the round itself.

For golfers, the experience leans strongly toward the aesthetic and historical rather than the purely competitive. The design works with the estate's geometry and mature tree lines, rewarding those willing to pay attention to placement and trajectory over raw power.