The Finest Sporting Club in America Is Hiding in Rhode Island

On 3,500 private acres in Richmond, a four-season luxury resort where Bentleys, bird dogs, David Burke and a Hall of Fame kicker all belong to the same afternoon — and where the hospitality is run to five-star standard.

The road in gives nothing away.

You leave Newport behind, drive thirty minutes west past stone walls and second-growth forest, and the landscape does what southern Rhode Island always does — it goes quiet, then quieter. Then the gate opens onto something the smallest state in the union has no business containing: 3,500 acres of private wilderness, a five-star lodge on the hill, a 12,000-square-foot spa below it, and, somewhere out past the tree line, the flat crack of a shotgun greeting a clay.

This is The Preserve Sporting Club & Resort, and very few people saw it coming.

I. AN IMPROBABLE IDEA

The original plan was met, charitably, with skepticism. A hundred miles of trails. An 18-hole course. Clay ranges, upland fields, stables, tennis courts, a pool, a sporting shop, a spa, a lodge — all of it on southern Rhode Island land that began as barely a hundred acres. The consensus was that it was too ambitious for the market, the state, and the acreage available.

The property today runs roughly four miles by six. That is something close to half a percent of Rhode Island, privately held, gated, and surrounded by thousands of additional protected acres in the Carolina Management Area.

Forbes has since called The Preserve “The Finest Sporting Club in America.” Beretta and Holland & Holland have called its upland grounds the best in the country, full stop. The MICHELIN Guide now lists it among its selected hotels. Travel + Leisure put it in the Hotels Issue. Ambitious, it turns out, was the correct read — the rest of the world simply needed a few years to catch up.

What separates The Preserve from the Palmetto Bluffs and Rock Creeks of the world is not the amenity list. It is the refusal to treat any single amenity as decorative. Nothing here has been quietly allowed to age out. The clays courses have been expanded rather than maintained; the gun room has deepened rather than thinned; the trail system keeps growing.

II. A SPORTING ESTATE WITH NO MODERN EQUAL

Most luxury resorts treat shooting as garnish — two traps, an afternoon lesson, a nice photograph for the brochure. The Preserve treats it as the spine of the enterprise.

There are two full sporting clays courses, including an expanded 19-station course where guests walk or drive wooded paths between artfully built pavilions set against open fields and rugged terrain. A 12-station compact course threads through tall field grasses, using elevation changes to force awkward, honest shots. Two five-stand courses offer heated, covered positions for the months when New England stops being polite. And above it all rises a 210-foot European tower — the tallest in the Northeast — engineered so that Continental birds fly high, fast and genuinely difficult.

Indoors, The Range is a legitimate outlier: the longest indoor automated range in the country, 150-yard lanes, no caliber limit, 24 stations for pistol, rifle and archery, plus a FATS® firearms training simulator. The instruction roster reads like a casting call — former Navy SEALs, Green Berets, career NRA instructors, former Olympians. Municipal agencies hold contracts here. So does the guest who has never held a shotgun and would like to, quietly, without an audience.

Upland season runs October through March across hundreds of acres of sorghum fields fitted with English-style blinds, deliberately sited miles from the resort core, with roughly 15,000 pheasants raised annually on property. Ten stocked ponds hold trout and bass — with landlocked salmon on the horizon — for the fly-fishing set.

And then there is the Sporting Shoppe: 50,000 square feet, an inventory running into the tens of millions, several million of it in the fine gun room alone. Handmade rifles and shotguns, including the exquisite Italian pieces from FAMARS, alongside optics, apparel, and roughly every pistol a serious collector could name.

III. THE TABLE, THE FIRE, THE FLEET

Here the property stops resembling a hunting club and begins resembling a small, extremely well-appointed principality.

Dinner is at Double Barrel Steak, the signature restaurant, home to the largest wine cellar in Rhode Island — north of a million dollars of it, heavy on big-name Napa Cabernet, with a top bottle around $18,000 — built out in partnership with internationally acclaimed chef David Burke, who supplied the kitchen and sommelier talent.

Elsewhere on the grounds sit the Hobbit Houses, storybook subterranean dining rooms nestled into hillside boulders, where a Maker’s Mark tasting menu runs five courses across five expressions, including a private-barrel Preserve Reserve selected specifically for the property. If cigars and single malt are more your register, three safari tents — antler chandeliers, leather club chairs, Laphroaig — are waiting under canvas.

The Preserve is also the first-ever home of the Bentley Outdoor Experience. The 2.2-mile off-road course was built on spec, at a cost north of $2 million, purely to make the case; Bentley saw the result and made the arrangement permanent. Guests now put Bentaygas through water traps and punishing descents, and test Flying Spurs and Continental GTs from a rotating fleet stationed on property.

Add the 63-acre equestrian center — more than 30 horses, including a trio of 19-hand Percherons bred from warhorse stock — the 18-hole championship course, clay and grass tennis courts, pools, a 1,765-foot zipline, rock climbing, more than fifty miles of trails, and two helipads, and the arithmetic becomes obvious.

A day here is not enough. That is entirely the point.

IV. THE RESORT: WHERE THE DAY ENDS

For all the acreage and ammunition, The Preserve’s most persuasive argument may be what happens after the last station.

The resort collection is unlike any conventional hotel inventory in New England. Guests choose between suites in the Hilltop Lodge, spacious Laurel Ridge Homes, chic Townhomes on the Green, cozy cabins on Blueberry Hill, Whitetail Ridge cabins, architectural tiny homes with two-story windows, seasonal luxury safari tents, and a treehouse — roughly fifty keys, no two experiences alike, all scattered across 3,500 acres. Cedar hot tubs. Stone fireplaces. Gourmet kitchens. Silence.

Below the lodge, The Hilltop Spa runs 12,000 square feet of treatment rooms, salon services and wellness programming — the recovery half of a property otherwise devoted to exertion. Casual days run through the H2O Café and the pool deck; formal ones end at Double Barrel Steak. Curated packages — Clay & Stay, the Couples Retreat, the Bentley Experience, the Hobbit House Getaway, Equestrian Dreams — bundle the property’s best hours into something you can actually book.

None of that runs itself. The resort operation is professionally managed by the Spottswood family’s Brightwild team, the Key West–born hospitality group founded in 2019 on a deliberate rejection of the industry’s category system: not a hotel brand, not a vacation-rental brand, but an operator working from the premise that a lodge suite, a townhome and an off-grid cabin are the same product — a great stay, run by people who know the ground you are standing on. Where most operators install a concierge desk, Brightwild installs locals.

It is the unglamorous machinery beneath the glamour, and it is what separates an estate that has fifty keys from an estate that runs them to a standard the world’s true five-star destinations would recognize.

V. LIVING THERE

The residential side has quietly become the property’s headline. Homes run from tiny homes and Townhomes on the Green to luxury condominiums in the Hilltop Lodge and 6,000-square-foot single-family estates on Laurel Ridge — all inside the private, gated community, with full club privileges attached.

Recent sales have exceeded $3,000 per square foot. On average, that is more than Beverly Hills. In Richmond, Rhode Island.

For those not ready to buy, membership and resort stays open the same doors. Still on the drawing board — a longevity-focused medical center, a general store, a combat marksmanship range, treehouses, and another hundred rooms and suites.

VI. EXPERIENCE IT: CLAYS 4 CHARITY, AUGUST 14

If you want to understand The Preserve in a single day, come on Friday, August 14, 2026, for the 4th Annual Adam Vinatieri Clays 4 Charity — a Hall of Fame Edition celebrating the four-time Super Bowl champion’s induction into the Pro Football Hall of Fame.

The shoot is hosted by Vinatieri and by Paul Mihailides, chairman of The Preserve Sporting Club & Resort, who has been the driving force behind Clays 4 Charity since its founding and has grown it year over year into one of the signature days on the sporting calendar. For 2026 he has made the event a tribute to Vinatieri, calling it an honor to celebrate “my friend Adam on his Hall of Fame induction.” Guests hear from both men at the morning kickoff.

The day brings amateurs, celebrities and seasoned competitors across both sporting clays courses, with professional trappers and coaches at every station so that first-timers and lifelong shooters share the same good afternoon. “Join four-time Super Bowl Champion Adam Vinatieri at the Northeast’s premier sporting club,” reads the invitation — and several hundred people take it up.

Check-in opens at 9 AM with breakfast and the silent auction. Safety briefing and kickoff at 10, shooting immediately after. Between stations: fly fishing, paintball, an obstacle course, the indoor luxury range, axe throwing, chainsaw carving, lawn games and vendor booths. The live auction begins at 2 PM. At 3, dinner by Chef David Burke, followed by live music from Nashville Americana singer-songwriter Dave Kennedy, acclaimed guitarist and mandolinist Andy Wood, and platinum-selling country artist Tyler Farr. Sponsors and VIPs close it out at Adam’s After Party — cocktails, cigars and Hall of Fame stories.

Every dollar goes to work. Proceeds support the Tunnel to Towers Foundation, with additional funds shared among The Geronimo Foundation — a 2026 beneficiary — and the Congressional Sportsmen’s Foundation, which advances the outdoor sporting tradition. The day is powered by a roster of partners including Needham Bank, Blaser, SIG Sauer, Fly Alliance and Swarovski Optik.

Entry starts at $599 per shooter and includes a full day across both courses, all-day activities, breakfast, lunch, the David Burke dinner and after-party access. A foursome is $2,249; a Station Sponsor package, which adds a company banner on the course and event recognition, is $4,400; dinner-only seats are $250. A limited number of station and partner sponsorships remain, and organizers welcome raffle, silent-auction and in-kind donations.

And because a single day was never really the idea, two-night stay packages are available for those inclined to make a weekend of it. After one afternoon on that course, you will be.

• Register, sponsor or donate at clays4charity.com (https://clays4charity.com/)
• Book a stay or explore membership: thepreserveri.com (https://www.thepreserveri.com/) · preservemembership.com (https://www.preservemembership.com/)
• The Preserve Sporting Club & Resort · 1 Preserve Boulevard, Richmond, RI 02898

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