Treatments
The Ridgemont Restoration (ninety minutes, $285) pairs the spring-stone ritual with a massage drawn to each member's file. Facials, wraps, and the golfer's hour complete the book.
Beyond the Course
The full day.
Tennis on clay, platform tennis through the winter, croquet by silver, a springhouse spa, and two pools the children grow up in.
Racquets
Eight clay, four hard, three platform, four pickle
The racquets program is directed by Priya Ramanathan, who arrived from the Merion Cricket Club in 2011 and has since made Ridgemont the quiet powerhouse of Central Virginia interclub tennis. The eight Har-Tru courts are swept each morning at seven; the four deco-turf hard courts carry the winter play; the three platform courts, heated and lit, run a Friday-night league from November through March that the membership defends fiercely.
Clinics run Tuesday through Saturday; the junior program takes children from six, and the club championship — the Vance Cup, since 1963 — is played the second weekend of September.
- Tennis8 Har-Tru · 4 deco-turf, litApril – November
- Platform3 heated courts, hut with hearthNovember – March
- Pickleball4 dedicated courts at the lower paddockYear-round
The Lawn
Six-wicket croquet, taken seriously
The croquet lawn has been mown to eleven millimetres each Monday since 1934. Six-wicket association rules govern; whites are required for sanctioned play; and the Whitfield Mallet — contested at the Midsummer Invitational each June — has been held by eleven families in ninety years, three of them twice.
Instruction is offered on Thursday mornings by the Lawn Committee, whose patience with beginners is legendary and whose mercy is not.
Spa & Wellness
The Stillhouse Spa
Nine treatment rooms in the springhouse of 1798, directed by Naomi Ellsworth. The stone cool room — fed by the original spring — is kept at fifty-eight degrees and is the finest seat in the county in August.
The Waters
A warm hydrotherapy pool, the cold spring plunge at forty-eight degrees, eucalyptus steam, and a quiet room where telephones have never once been answered.
Movement
Yoga on the spa lawn at half past seven, Tuesday through Sunday in season; Pilates in the Garden Studio; tai chi on the croquet lawn before the Monday mowing.
Fitness
The pavilion on the meadow
The fitness pavilion of 2014 is a glass-and-timber shed set into the bank above the lower meadow, open from five in the morning until nine at night. Its floor carries a full complement of strength and conditioning equipment, two Woodway treadmills facing the sunrise, and a small studio for private work.
Three trainers hold standing hours; the winter program for the golf membership — strength, mobility, and the February school in Florida — is by far the most quietly competitive roster in the club.
The Pools
Twenty-five yards under glass, and a summer pool for the children
The saline lap pool is kept at eighty-two degrees beneath a retractable glass roof — six lanes, masters' swims Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at six, and lessons from Memorial Day. The family pool, terraced below the clubhouse with its own grille and lemonade stand, is where three generations of members have learned to swim under the patient eye of the aquatics staff.
Adult hours are kept from six to eight each morning and again at five; the Fourth of July raft race, run since 1968, is the one day the lanes come out entirely.