(Bloomberg) -- A few years after golf legend Arnold Palmer died in 2016, Louise Bellisimo was chatting with her friend Kit, Palmer’s second wife.
Bellisimo lives in Newport Beach, California, and remembered that Kit had a house at the famed Tradition Golf Club in La Quinta, a course in that state’s Coachella Valley designed by Arnold himself. “I said, ‘The next time you’re down in the desert, let me know and I’ll drive over,’” Bellisimo says. (The course is about 40 minutes from Palm Springs International Airport.) But, she recalls, her friend said that “nobody’s using it” and that Palmer’s daughters intended to sell the house. “I’d already stayed here with them, and I knew how charming it was,” Bellisimo says. “And I said, ‘Well, I’d like to buy it.’”
The next day, Bellisimo got on the phone with her friend’s trust attorney, “because I figured once the word was out, there would be multiple people interested in it,” she says. “We put together a deal that day.” She slowly renovated the 2,617-square-foot structure, bringing it, in her words, “into the new century.”
But soon after the renovation was completed, her life—namely a desire to be closer to her grandchildren—got in the way. So Bellisimo is putting the house on the market, listing it with Tamara Baron of Desert Sotheby’s International Realty for $5 million. “I’ve walked away from other beautiful things,” Bellisimo says. “The fun has really just been seeing how it came out.”
As Palmer Left It
The house sits on a bit less than half an acre and has four bedrooms and three-and-a-half baths. It’s located, Bellisimo says, exactly 167 steps from the clubhouse’s men’s locker room. (One of her guests counted.) The Tradition Golf Course opened in 1997, the clubhouse opened in 1998, and Palmer’s house was completed in 1999.
In addition to its proximity to the clubhouse, the house has a prime location on the course Palmer designed. “I heard that he wanted to practice his short game,” Bellisimo says, “so the house sits right on the second fairway of the short course. You walk out the door, and in 15, 20 steps you’re on the tee box.”
When Bellisimo bought the property in 2022, the house was exactly as Palmer left it, with all of its furniture. (His family removed his clothing.) “I donated a lot of it to his charity, which he called Mulligans,” Bellisimo says. But she kept his two leather chairs, which sat in front of the fireplace, and one of the beds, along with a box of pictures she found in the garage.
After that, she redid the house from the bottom up. “It just needed a refresh,” she says. “But I kept the outside exactly the same, because it’s so charming.”
The Renovations
Bellisimo removed the structure’s wood floors and replaced them with Saltillo tile. She took out the rear doors, which she estimates were about 6 feet across, and widened the opening to 10 feet, so residents could have views of the Santa Rosa mountains. “The view is so spectacular that we opened up the whole back of the house, which is the way of doing this now; back then it wasn’t,” she says.
She painted the walls white, moved the fireplace to the center of the room (“I thought it was a little to the side,” she says) and redid all of the bathrooms and cabinetry. But she adds that she didn’t stray far from the golf legend’s original taste. “I saved the style of the home,” she says. “I left all the arches, and I left it so that he could walk in and like it.”
Today, the house has four bedrooms, one on each corner; at the center is a large living room with 16-foot-high beamed ceilings.
Palmer might also feel at home with all of the photographs Bellisimo unearthed in “a dirty old box,” which she says she almost threw away. One depicts the golfer in fancy dress with someone dressed as a cowgirl; another, taken with the famed caddy Michael “Fluff” Cowan, is inscribed to Palmer with the line “To Arnold, It’s been a gas. —Fluff.” Yet another shows Palmer coming out of a grassy bunker at the 1983 US Open.
All of the photos, Bellisimo says, were cleaned and reframed and mounted—they, along with the armchairs, are part of the sale price. “Whoever buys it will want those chairs, because they’re so emblematic of him,” she says. The sale also includes Palmer’s personal golf cart.
Despite only owning the house for two years—when it was often under construction—Bellisimo says it wasn’t a quick flip. She did it in phases, so she’d have bedrooms to sleep in when she came out to play on the course. “I didn’t ever buy it thinking I was going to sell it,” she says. “It’s just that things change with the family, and I can’t get them out here as much as I’d like. So I have to go to them.”
©2025 Bloomberg L.P.