Joyenval (Retz)

Overview: The Retz Course at Golf de Joyenval is an 18-hole private parkland routing west of Paris, set within the historic landscape of the Désert de Retz and the surrounding forest. Robert Trent Jones Sr. used the large property to create a more expansive companion to the Marly Course, with broad fairways, defended greens, subtle doglegs and changes of direction that reward a thoughtful target-golf strategy. The setting is unusually layered: golfers move through a quiet wooded environment while the historic landscape of the Désert de Retz gives the course a sense of place that is much older than the golf club itself.

History: Joyenval opened in 1992 as a 36-hole club with two Robert Trent Jones Sr. designs. The architect was drawn to the 220-hectare property and its combination of exceptional ground and history, including land associated with the Désert de Retz, a former aristocratic landscape garden. In 2004 the club joined the Robert Trent Jones Society, and in 2018 Robert Trent Jones Jr. and his son visited Joyenval as the club worked to restore the layouts toward the original design intentions. Retz therefore carries both the senior Jones authorship and an ongoing family design legacy.

Did You Know? The Désert de Retz was created at the end of the eighteenth century by François Racine de Monville as an experimental landscape garden containing between seventeen and twenty structures. Ten of those structures still survive. Joyenval's Retz Course is consequently played on a site that is not merely wooded parkland, but a listed historical landscape with its own architectural monuments.