Four in one

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The courses were designed before the real estate element.

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75% of plots will face a golf course.

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Water plays an important role in the development.

There are a number of new golf courses under design in the UAE at present but none has attracted the attention that Jumeirah Golf Estates has. COD gets the lowdown.

Inspiration for designs can come from many different sources. The inspiration for Dubai's iconic Burj Al Arab, for example, came from the sail of a dhow.

Abu Dhabi's Masdar city, meanwhile, draws inspiration from traditional Arabic cities. The inspiration for Jumeirah Golf Estates, the mega golf community under development in Dubai, came from the book/film The Da Vinci Code, David Spencer, CEO of Leisurecorp, the owner of Jumeirah Golf Estates explains.

"The idea was to take a multiple golf course development and showcase the environment. At the time The Da Vinci Code was really hot.

We wanted to have this environmental feel and someone had seen the movie on the plane, and we had earth, wind, water, fire representing the elements, and that's how it started," he explains.

The area selected by the developers, located near the Green Community in Dubai, suited the idea of different courses with elevations varying up to 30 metres on the site.

Each of the four courses will have its own identity. The Fire course, designed by Greg Norman, will have dramatic flora and an orange-coloured sand. "The Fire course is very much a desert golf course.

It will look like a course you would expect to see in Arizona, lots of natural desert sand with bright emerald green bunkers and a local sand that's quite orangey so the bunkers will look like flames.

The Earth course [also designed by Norman] is much more of a parkland style course, more trees, more shrubs, more flowers, so it's almost diametrically opposed," Spencer reveals.

The Water course, meanwhile, which was designed by Vijay Singh, will have ribbons of wetland and oasis areas. Inspired by the Dubai wetland reserve Ras al Khor, it will be the flattest of the four courses.

The Wind course, jointly designed by Greg Norman, Sergio Garcia, and ‘the Pablo Picasso of golf course design' Pete Dye, will feature undulating fairways, thick rough, pot bunkers, and patterns of the wind.

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