Beau Rivage Resort & Casino

Start with the atrium. The resort keeps a horticulture operation and changes the planting through the year — spring bulbs, summer colour, a substantial Christmas installation — and the space is open to anybody who walks in. On a wet February afternoon on the Mississippi coast that is not a small thing, and nobody will ask why you are there.

The pool deck is the second draw and the one most guests underrate, because the mainland beach across the highway is flat brown Sound water and the pool is not. It is large, it is heated in the cool months and it fills on summer afternoons. Loungers go early.

The spa and salon operate on the usual resort model: book ahead in season, expect resort pricing, and treat the thermal areas as part of what you are paying for rather than an add-on.

Food covers a wide band. There is a steakhouse at the top end, a buffet in the middle that has a genuine local reputation, casual counters at the bottom, and a coffee bar. Reservations matter on Friday and Saturday nights, when the resort is full of people who drove down from Jackson or across from Mobile.

And then there is the theatre, which is the part that makes an evening. Touring comedians, country acts, tribute shows and the occasional name that would fill a shed in a bigger city play a room small enough that the back row is still a good seat. Book those before you travel; they sell out and the resort is the only place they play on this coast.

On the morning of 29 August 2005 the surge came across US 90 and through the ground floor of this building. The gaming space, the restaurants, the lobby and everything at street level were destroyed. The tower stood, as concrete towers generally do, and the resort closed.

The rebuild took a year almost exactly, and the choice to reopen on the anniversary was not an accident. In a city where thousands of jobs are in these buildings, the reopening was the clearest signal available that the industry was coming back, and it was reported as such far beyond Mississippi.

There is a second consequence that outlasted the ribbon-cutting. Mississippi law before 2005 required coastal casinos to float — the gaming floors were on barges moored alongside the hotels, which is precisely why the surge was able to destroy them so completely. In a special session after the storm the legislature permitted coastal casinos to rebuild their gaming floors on land within eight hundred feet of the shoreline. Every casino you walk into in Biloxi today is a consequence of that change.

You can still see the old logic if you look at where these buildings sit: hard against the water, on the wrong side of a highway, because that is where a barge had to be. The gaming floors just came ashore.

Fallen Oak is the course associated with the resort and it is not on the coast. It sits inland at Saucier, roughly half an hour north through the pine country behind Biloxi, and it is a Tom Fazio design that opened in November 2006 as part of the same rebuilding push that reopened the hotel.

The layout uses ground that has almost nothing in common with the shoreline: rolling terrain, live oaks, ponds and pine, closer in character to inland Mississippi than to a links. Players who came expecting a coastal course are usually surprised, generally in a good way.

Access has historically been limited to guests of the resort, booked through the hotel, and the arrangement has shifted over the years. Confirm the current policy and pricing directly before you plan a golfing trip around it, because this is exactly the kind of detail that changes quietly.

It is worth saying that the coast has other golf that does not require a hotel booking, spread across Harrison and Hancock counties and generally cheaper. Fallen Oak is the trophy round, not the only one, and the drive inland is part of the day either way.