Montage Palmetto Bluff

Live oaks hung with Spanish moss line the roads into Palmetto Bluff, a 20,000-acre tract of pine forest, salt marsh and tidal creeks on the May River, between Hilton Head Island and Savannah. Montage Palmetto Bluff, the resort at its heart, opened as an inn in 2004 and took the Montage name in 2016, on land that a New York financier once kept as a winter retreat.

History

The bluff was plantation country before the Civil War, and after it the land went quiet. In the early twentieth century Richard T. Wilson Jr., a New York financier, bought the tract and built a large mansion overlooking the river as a winter hunting house. It burned in 1926, and its ruins survive on the bluff. The Union Camp Corporation then owned the land for timber, which kept it largely undeveloped for most of the century. Crescent Resources bought Palmetto Bluff at the end of the 1990s and opened The Inn at Palmetto Bluff, managed by Auberge Resorts, in 2004, alongside a planned community of houses set well back in the woods. South Street Partners acquired the estate in 2014 and brought in Montage Hotels & Resorts, which built a new main inn, renovated the cottages and reopened the resort under its own name in 2016.

Architecture and design

The buildings follow the Lowcountry vernacular: white clapboard, deep porches, metal roofs and shutters, set among oaks and lawns that run down to the water. The main inn has the scale of a large plantation house. The rest of the resort is laid out as a village of cottages along the river. A white wooden chapel stands on the bluff above the May River, and it has become the image most people associate with the estate.

Rooms and suites

Accommodation is split between rooms and suites in the main inn, the cottages from the original inn scattered through the grounds, and larger houses for families or groups. Many cottages have screened porches and face the river or the woods. Guests move around the estate by bicycle, golf cart or on foot along sandy roads under the trees, and the distances are long enough that most do not bother with a car.

Dining

River House, on the water, is the main restaurant, and its cooking leans on Lowcountry seafood, shrimp and the oysters of the May River. More casual meals are served in Wilson Village, the small settlement of shops and restaurants laid out near the inn, and at the golf clubhouse. Bluffton, a few miles upriver, still has a working oyster house on the riverbank.

Wellness

Spa Montage occupies its own building, with treatment rooms and a fitness centre, and the resort has several pools. The May River Golf Club course, designed by Jack Nicklaus, runs through the pines and along the marsh. Boating and fishing on the river, sporting clays at the shooting club, riding at the equestrian centre and walks along the trails of the Palmetto Bluff Conservancy make up the rest of the outdoor programme.

Weddings and events

Weddings are central to the resort's calendar. Ceremonies are held at the riverside chapel and on lawns under the oaks, with receptions in the inn's event rooms or in marquees on the grounds. The resort also hosts corporate retreats and meetings, often combined with golf and time on the water.

Location

Palmetto Bluff lies within the town of Bluffton, in Beaufort County, about forty minutes by car from Savannah/Hilton Head International Airport. Hilton Head Island Airport is closer for smaller aircraft, and Savannah's Amtrak station is the nearest by rail. Old Town Bluffton, with its galleries and the Church of the Cross, an 1850s church above the river, is a short drive away. As a luxury resort in Bluffton, it trades the beaches of Hilton Head for river and forest, and most guests are content with the swap.