Le Faon

Raray is one of those French villages that stops time. The commune in the Oise department, roughly 50 kilometers north of Paris in the heart of the Picardy region, is best known for its 17th-century Château de Raray — a building so theatrically beautiful, with its stone hunting-scene bas-reliefs lining the approach, that Jean Cocteau used it as the Beast's castle in his 1946 film *La Belle et la Bête*. Golf here arrives with that same sense of having wandered into a world apart.

Le Faon is a private club set within the estate's grounds, playing through the kind of mature parkland — broad hardwoods, sculpted fairways, gentle Picard topography — that French country golf does particularly well. The layout rewards patience and course management over raw power, and the proximity to the château gives even an ordinary round a quietly cinematic backdrop that few clubs anywhere in France can match.

The regional golf scene pulls from the affluent northern Paris commuter belt, and Le Faon carries the unhurried, members-first character typical of that tradition — a place where the golf is taken seriously but never at the expense of the lunch afterward.