A Fourth Eighteen, and a Fourth Great Name
Streamsong has announced the name of its next course. It is called Bone Valley, it is the work of David McLay Kidd, and it will be the resort’s fourth full-length eighteen. Preview play opens on 30 October 2026. The formal opening follows on 26 January 2027.
The significance is not the count. It is the company the new course keeps.
Four Architects, One Property
Streamsong already holds three courses by three of the most consequential architects working in the minimalist tradition. Red came from Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw in 2012. Blue arrived the same year from Tom Doak. Black followed in 2017 from Gil Hanse and Jim Wagner. All three sit inside GOLF Magazine’s ranking of the country’s best public courses.
Adding Kidd completes something close to a full set. There is no other property in American golf where those four names appear side by side, on the same land, built for the same visitor. Resorts assemble rosters like this over generations, if at all. Streamsong has done it inside fifteen years.
Kidd’s own line on the announcement was characteristically short: “What’s next, is now.”
Why the Name Is the Story
Bone Valley is not a marketing invention. It is the actual name of the region — a stretch of central Florida that sits atop one of the richest fossil beds in North America. When this part of the state lay beneath a prehistoric sea, it collected the remains of what lived there. The phosphate industry later dug it all up.
That mining is the reason Streamsong looks the way it does. The dunes, ridges and sudden elevation that make the property so unlikely for Florida are spoil — sand moved and piled by decades of extraction, then left to settle and grow over. Golf came afterwards, and found the ground already interesting.
So the name closes a loop. The fossils and the landforms came from the same industrial century. Steve Skinner, chief executive of KemperSports, which operates the resort, called it “a natural fit for the land and a course that was literally millions of years in the making.”
What Kidd Tends to Build
Kidd made his name at Bandon Dunes in 1999, the course that started the American destination-golf era in earnest. His later work — Gamble Sands in Washington, Mammoth Dunes at Sand Valley — moved deliberately towards width, generous ground and a kind of golf that rewards the ambitious shot rather than punishing the imperfect one.
That matters here. Streamsong’s existing three are admired, and two of them are hard. Black in particular asks a great deal on a windy afternoon. A Kidd course on this land is likely to be the one guests finish grinning about rather than recounting their score from.
Streamsong has been moving in that direction already. The Chain, the resort’s short course, opened to unusually warm reception for a layout with no scorecard obligation attached. Bone Valley reads as the same instinct applied at full length.
What It Means for a Visit
Practically, the resort becomes a longer stay. Three championship courses and a short course already justified several days. Four eighteens, two of them by architects whose work people plan trips around, changes the arithmetic of how long is worth staying.
The awkward window is the one just ahead. Anyone visiting Streamsong this autumn will play the property in its current form — three courses and The Chain — while the fourth sits finished and waiting a few weeks out. Preview play at the end of October is the first chance to see it, and the January opening is when it enters the rotation properly.
For anyone weighing when to go, that is the decision: play the established three now, or wait for the set to be complete.
LXV members interested in Streamsong, including the Links Golf Collective tournament on the property this September, can reach the team through the concierge.