CARLSBAD, Calif. -- Here in Southern California, where makeovers are as common as freeway police chases, the Grande Dame of spa resorts -- La Costa Resort and Spa -- has undergone one of the best of them all.

At a cost of $140 million, La Costa, which celebrates its 40th anniversary next year, has transformed itself from a worn-out property to the high-end destination resort on which its reputation was built when developer Allard Roen opened the resort (then known as Rancho La Costa) as a 90-room inn.

"It's been like watching a butterfly come out of the cocoon," said La Costa General Manager April Shute.

Indeed. The first change guests returning to La Costa see is that the circular drive that divided the resort's two main buildings is gone, replaced by a more casual circle drive surrounded by the "California Colonial" architecture that's a big part of the renovation. If nothing else, the new entrance is much more inviting and has less a factory feel than its predecessor.

Beyond the new entrance is a village-style Spanish plaza complete with a large fountain and surrounded by a series of retail shops.

On the other side of the shops (just follow the signs) is the centerpiece of the new La Costa -- the $12 million Spa that features 42 treatment rooms and a 15,000-square-foot outdoor courtyard where guests can lounge around the pool before or after treatments, as well as a Roman waterfall.

Try the Thai massage -- very popular these days -- to help loosen muscles and give you a gauge of how flexible you are -- or aren't. There's a plethora of other massages and body treatments to choose from, and men, Shute said, are becoming more frequent patrons.

"It's about a 70/30 split between men and women," Shute said. "It used to be around 80/20 but I expect we'll continue to see it going the other way even more."

For those seriously into a wellness lifestyle, the resort has the famed Chopra Center that features up to five-day detoxifying and rejuvenation programs.

The Chopra Center offers mind/body medical evaluations and educational classes that include meditation, yoga, natural nutrition, daily fitness, lifestyle routine and emotional fulfillment, along with traditional Ayurvedic Spa body therapies. Ayurveda is a 5,000-year-old traditional system of natural healing and modern science that cleanses and re-energizes the body and soul.

And on the subject of re-energizing, each of La Costa's 474 rooms has been renovated with a brighter design than before, with leather accents in the living areas and imported marble in the oversized bathrooms. Each of the rooms overlooks the grounds or golf courses.

Sorry, no beach views. Those are about 20 minutes away in Carlsbad-by-the-Sea, the quaint beach community that somehow has managed to retain much of its charm despite the urban sprawl of San Diego to the south and Orange County to the north. The sunsets along Carlsbad's beaches are some of the best along coast of California.

Oh yes, golf. La Costa is perhaps best known these days as the site of the Accenture Match Play Championship, won earlier this year by Tiger Woods. The "Accenture," as it's known around here, is played on an 18-hole combination of La Costa's North and South Courses.

La Costa's original 18 holes was designed in 1961 by Dick Wilson -- a surprise to many who think of Wilson's work primarily in the Southeast with the likes of Bay Hill in Orlando, the Blue Monster at Doral Resort (a sister property to La Costa in the KSL Recreation portfolio) in Miami and the renovation of Donald Ross' classic Seminole Golf Club in North Palm Beach, Fla.

An additional 18 holes were added by Wilson's old partner Joe Lee in the early 1970s and it was all divided into what are now La Costa's North and South courses. Each course consists of some holes in Wilson's original design and, given Wilson's master work with bunkering, aren't too hard to spot even after all these years.

The courses play in the valley below the resort clubhouse with multi-million-dollar homes on either side. That's basically how Roen envisioned things when he first started horseback riding on this land, which borders two old Mexican land grants -- Agua Hedionda to the north and Rancho Las Encinitas to the south -- in the early 1960s. In other words, he wanted the clubhouse on top so guests and homeowners could look over what was then a virtually unspoiled Southern California landscape.

That landscape isn't as unspoiled these days, but the views are very much the same, particularly from the terrace of La Costa's Legends restaurant, a favorite spot among locals for a power lunch and certainly for the final match of the Accenture.

The Legends terrace during lunch also is a good place to spot executives from some of golf's best-known equipment companies, such as Callaway Golf (NYSE: ELY), TaylorMade-adidas Golf and sister companies Cobra and Titleist, all of which call Carlsbad home. The late Gary Adams, founder of Taylor Made Golf (now TMaG) and widely regarded as father of the metal wood, had a home near La Costa and often held court on the terrace and inside the clubhouse lounge.

Adams' success with TaylorMade in the 1980s and Ely Callaway's success with Callaway Golf in the '90s that helped put the city of Carlsbad on the map. Other companies, inside and outside of golf, followed, and Carlsbad today is virtually unrecognizable from what it was even 10 years ago.

That growth has undoubtedly opened up an entirely new clientele to La Costa -- a clientele that, at least in the golf industry, comes from all around the world to see how the big boys work and play.

By the way, there is a no fraternizing among the equipment companies at the Legends, meaning there's a different table for each company. Even casual eye contact is considered a serious breach of corporate etiquette. Rest assured, however, that each executive knows who is at the next table.

That's just part of life at La Costa. And with La Costa's new look, life just got a whole lot better.