The small club next to the big one
Head east on Cave Creek Road from Pima, and before you reach the gates of Desert Mountain there is a quieter one: Mirabel, a 713-acre private community with one golf course and about 335 homesites, at around 3,000 feet. It is everything Desert Mountain is not. Desert Mountain has seven courses and more than 5,000 residents; Mirabel has a single Tom Fazio course, a lodge for a clubhouse and a membership capped at 275 golfers.
The course opened on December 1, 2001: par 71, 7,146 yards, bentgrass greens, walkable, with caddies. Discovery Land Company built the community and handed the club to its members in 2009.
What sets it apart is scale, and a membership that does not require a house: you can join Mirabel without living there. You cannot, however, book a tee time. It is private, and you play it as a member’s guest.
How it plays
Mirabel’s course is known as a playable Fazio design: generous fairways, strategic bunkering and forward tees that make sense for every level, with five sets of tees from 5,105 to 7,146 yards. The club’s own pride is its greens, which it calls the best in the Valley, and the course’s character comes from its long par 4s, the 9th and 18th especially, which the club calls a Fazio trademark. Top 100 Golf Courses singles out the 472-yard 4th and the 466-yard 13th as well.
The 10th is the hole with the only real water on the course, its fairway curling around a pond. The 11th is the photograph, with Pinnacle Peak behind the green. Walking is part of the culture, and the caddie program is the club’s other point of pride.
The club
The Desert Lodge Clubhouse, about 37,000 square feet, opened in November 2003, styled as an early-1900s desert lodge with indoor-outdoor rooms built for the climate. It has fine and casual dining, a spa and salon, a clay-court tennis center, pickleball, a fitness center and a pool with private cabanas; Golf Inc. ranked it second in its 2021 Clubhouse of the Year awards. Guests are billed to their host and held to the club’s dress code, which bans athletic wear and backward caps in the clubhouse.
Membership
Mirabel spells out its structure more plainly than most clubs: 275 golf and 50 social memberships, all equity and transferable. Golf membership includes unlimited golf and the clubhouse, and social membership everything but the golf. Owning a home is not required. The club does not publish its initiation fee. Homeowners pay a separate association fee, $990 a quarter as of January 2020.
Nearby
Mirabel sits on the Carefree side of the Desert Mountain district. The nearest dinner anyone can book is in Carefree: the Boulders, with Palo Verde, and the Spotted Donkey Cantina at its Scottsdale Road entrance.
The course that replaced a course
Mirabel’s start is one of the stranger stories in Scottsdale golf. By the account of Top 100 Golf Courses, a project called Stonehaven was here at the end of the 1990s, with a Greg Norman course nearly ready to open, when Michael Meldman’s Discovery Land Company bought the property, renamed it Mirabel and gave Tom Fazio a budget of about $15 million to replace Norman’s layout with one of his own. We have not found the Stonehaven story in a second source, so read it as the reviewers’ account; the club’s own history begins with Discovery Land.
That history is precise. The first homesite sold on September 15, 2001, the course opened on December 1, 2001, the clubhouse on November 1, 2003, and the club became member-owned on October 1, 2009, in the middle of the crash that left many developer clubs in far worse shape. Mirabel has kept the boutique model it started with.
The rankings have followed the course steadily rather than loudly: Golf Digest’s best-in-state lists from 2005, a place at 18th in Arizona in 2023, and Golfweek’s Top 100 Residential Courses in 2005, 2015 and 2022. For the district around it and the public desert golf nearby, see the Desert Mountain neighborhood guide and our golf without a membership note.