Lake Naomi Club

Few places in the Pocono Mountains carry as much quiet prestige as Lake Naomi Club, a private retreat in Pocono Pines that has served as a summer escape for generations of Philadelphia and New York-area families. The surrounding community — built around the lake itself — gives the club a distinctly residential, old-money character that sets it apart from the region's more commercial resort offerings. Membership here is very much a way of life, not just an amenity.

The Poconos provide a naturally compelling canvas for golf: rolling, wooded terrain shaped by glacial activity, cool summers relative to the mid-Atlantic cities below, and a tree canopy that turns spectacular in autumn. Pocono Pines sits in the heart of this plateau country, where rounds tend to play through corridors of hardwoods and alongside the kind of natural water features the region is named for.

Without question, Lake Naomi is the kind of course where the surroundings do as much work as the design — a place where the pleasure of a round is inseparable from the pleasure of simply being there.