Luxury ‘sporting retreats’ with hunting offer coronavirus safe havens
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It’s easier to cope with coronavirus lockdown when your backyard is thousands of acres of rolling hills, meadows and marshes.
So says Manhattanite Karyne Bazzano, who is hunkered down at her weekend home at The Preserve Club & Residences, a sprawling master-planned community in Rhode Island with lavish amenities that include hunting and shooting. Sons Casey, 13, and Christian, 16, are sheltering with her, virtually attending their private school in Providence, a 30-minute drive away.
During lunch, after school and on weekends, instead of piling on more screen time, the teens are outside practicing their golf swings and shooting at clay targets with supervision — and hardly another soul in sight.
“With 3,500 acres [5.4 square miles], we have the ATVs and the fishing gear and ponds and the rock wall, and I almost forget that I’m supposed to be afraid of the world outside the gate,” says Bazzano, a divorcee who usually operates a staffing service from her Upper East Side condo. “Imagine if we were in a 2,400-square-foot apartment somewhere? We would be crawling the walls.”
Steeply priced sporting communities — from South Carolina mainstay Palmetto Bluff to The Preserve, a relative newcomer — have cropped up along the Eastern Seaboard since the mid-1990s. While they have historically been playgrounds for second- or even third-home owners, they now double as rural refuges from COVID-19.
Developers offer buyers, members and sometimes renters thousands of acres of land, plenty of wildlife, stunning lodges, gourmet farm-to-table dining — and lavish houses. Amenities and activities for the active include fishing, archery, horseback riding and kayaking.
The Preserve, however, also boasts a 150-yard-long underground rifle range — the longest in the US. Places like The Preserve — where for-sale residences range from a $500,000 420-square-foot tiny home to a $4.5 million Hilltop Lodge co-op to be complete in July — prove revelatory for city dwellers.
“I’ve learned how to fly fish. I learned about shooting a shotgun,” says Bazzano. “I had never shot a gun before, and now I’ve shot pistols.”
Other outdoor aficionados, meanwhile, are spending lockdown at Palmetto Bluff. Larger than the island of Manhattan and situated between Savannah, Georgia, and Hilton Head, South Carolina, Palmetto Bluff boasts 22,000 acres (34 square miles) of residences and recreational preserve.
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