Luxury Partners The Bay Club: From Golf Resort to Coastal Destination

The Bay Club: From Golf Resort to Coastal Destination

Destination Development

Partnering with long-standing client Sunlife, Luxury Partners was appointed to reposition Anahita Golf & Spa Resort, reframing it not as a conventional resort but as the social and experiential heart of a distinctive coastal destination, shaped by the rhythms and rituals of the bay.

Case Study

On the east coast of Mauritius, the former Anahita Golf & Spa Resort occupies an enviable setting: overlooking the Île aux Cerfs lagoon, framed by championship fairways, and set within one of the island’s most prestigious bays. This stretch of coastline brings together a rare concentration of natural and man-made assets — from one of Mauritius’s widest lagoons and Île aux Cerfs Golf Club to the Anahita estate, residences, championship golf course, and neighbouring luxury landmarks, including Four Seasons Resort at Anahita, Shangri-La Le Touessrok, and the forthcoming Anahita Beau Champ. Together, these components form a unique destination system within the Mauritian landscape.

Yet despite the prestige of its neighbours, the property’s identity had grown misaligned.

Positioned as a resort, Anahita was increasingly judged against expectations it was never designed to meet. Without the continuous beachfront, density, or theatrical structure of a classic Mauritian beach hotel, it risked being perceived as something it was not. What it did possess in abundance — space, water access, golf, generously sized villas, and a lived-in sense of community — was harder to articulate and increasingly underplayed.

Luxury Partners was tasked by Sunlife, for whom we previously repositioned the master brand and its managed resort brands, to lead a strategic and creative rethink. The challenge was not to repackage Anahita Golf & Spa Resort but to clearly establish it as the nucleus of a broader lagoon destination ecosystem and to give coherence, confidence, and meaning to its role within it.

From Resort to Club

Our work began with a destination immersion: living on the estate, travelling by boat and buggy, walking the courses, crossing the lagoon, and spending time in conversation with owners, golfers, guests and staff. From this, a simple truth emerged: people spoke of Anahita not as a place they visited, but as a place they belonged.

Anahita was not underperforming as a resort; it was simply miscast as one. The issue was one of category, not experience. The opportunity lay in reframing the promise from beach resort to a coastal club: open and welcoming, defined by familiarity, and a shared lifestyle. A club not only in the golfing sense, but equally in the spirit of membership, community, rhythm, and return.

This radical reframing positions Anahita not as another Mauritian resort but as the gateway to the wider bay and its distinctive lifestyle. Access to a life that unfolds naturally on, by, and from the water — connecting the golf courses, residences, lagoon, Île aux Cerfs, and neighbouring hospitality destinations into a single, interconnected ecosystem, with the club as its social heartbeat.

The Rhythm of Belonging

From this insight emerged our generative idea – ‘The Rhythm of Belonging’. It captures how Anahita exists: not through spectacle or schedule, but through shared patterns of early tee times, lagoon sports, long lunches, sundowners and familiar faces.

This idea is anchored by the positioning statement, ‘A World Between Land and Lagoon’, expressed through three strategic differentiators: Calm Pulse, Effortless Intention, and Life Well Played.

The new name followed naturally. The Bay Club at Anahita reimagines the destination not as a resort by the beach, but as a club by the bay — one that draws together golf, water, residences, and community into a single point of belonging, while retaining Anahita as a trusted anchor.

Bringing The Bay Club to Life

The visual and verbal identity brings the strategy to life. Nautical yet never themed, refined yet relaxed, the system balances classic club cues with contemporary lightness — typography, colour, photography, and language working together to feel rhythmic, unforced, and alive. Pastel colourways drawn from the bay and lagoon soften the estate’s expression, introducing a sense of life and play alongside calm and restraint.

The tag line ‘Between Tee and Tide’ distils the brand essence into a phrase, focusing on the liminal space between golf and lagoon that The Bay Club occupies. Supported by a flexible messaging system built around The Rhythm of Belonging, the tag line allows the generative idea to flex across the guest experience — from Belonging to the Swing, the Reef, or the Breath — highlighting different moments of the experience while maintaining a consistent brand message.

Crucially, the new brand is not confined to communications. It is now being operationalised across the physical, human and experiential realms of a new guest experience system. Arrival sequences, mobility systems, uniform design, wayfinding and service behaviours ensure the club doesn’t just look different, but also behaves differently. Within days of the launch, the fresh identity was introduced across the club’s buggy fleet, which was given a new livery in striking pastels to create a mobile expression of the brand, adding colour, character, and ease to everyday movement across the estate.

A New Beginning

The launch of The Bay Club was conceived as an extension of the brand rather than a marketing moment.

On 1 December 2025, Sunlife hosted a gathering of investors, partners, residents, and friends to unveil The Bay Club. With new uniforms in place and the estate gently illuminated after dark, the evening captured the ease, warmth, and rhythm that define the bay.

At the heart of the evening was the premiere of a brand produced and directed by Luxury Partners. Centred on the rhythmic nature of golf, water, wellness and connection, it features the tempo and motion of The Bay Club experience. Through this piece of communication, the brand was established as the connective tissue between all elements of the bay, with the Rhythm of Belonging as the common thread.

Today, The Bay Club at Anahita stands with renewed clarity and confidence. No longer competing in the crowded language and landscape of resorts, it occupies a more distinctive space, standing as an inclusive coastal club – the social heartbeat of an unbeatable Mauritian destination.

For Sunlife, this repositioning provides a coherent platform aligned with long-term operational and commercial ambition. For guests and residents, it offers something rarer still: not a place to visit, but a place to belong, connect, and return.

Between tee and tide, The Bay Club at Anahita has finally found its rhythm.

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