1 Sep 2010

With the dust now well and truly settled on our 2010 Top 100 ranking list, it seems an appropriate time to look at what some of Australia’s established clubs are doing to improve their courses, and how the 2012 list might look as a result of major redesign projects. While we understand that our ranking list creates great debate among the industry, the truth is that most redesign programs are undertaken by golf clubs looking to enhance their facilities for members and guests, rather than for magazine ranking panels. This is entirely appropriate, although well-handled upgrades invariably carry the added benefit of a higher golf course ranking.

Despite a perceived slowdown across the golf design business, in the six months since our Top 100 list was published there has been plenty happening here in the local industry. Recent announcements that Greg Norman was closing his Australian design office were followed by news that Geoff Ogilvy had formed a partnership with respected Australian architect Michael Clayton. This is a significant development for Australian golf, and the Clayton Ogilvy collaboration is one that we will investigate more closely in a coming issue of the magazine.

On course, established clubs continue to look at ways to improve and a snapshot of what’s been happening, or what’s planned, reveals numerous developments that our panel will need to keep an eye on. Dethroned of top spot in 2010, Royal Melbourne looks to have addressed concerns over the conditioning of its wonderful courses, by building a large dam, a state-of-the-art stormwater treatment facility, and replacing its native couch fairways with the more drought tolerant Legends couch. The West Course greens have also been reseeded with the clubs famous Suttons mix, while a tighter fescue apron strip has been added to ensure that bouncing approach shots are still accepted. A recent site tour was very encouraging, and we are confident that the Composite course will be in superb shape come next November’s President’s Cup. The great news for Members is that both East and West layouts will be even better a year or two later.

The fall of the West Course at Royal Melbourne (from 1 to 3) was the most significant on our recent list, but its namesake at the Indooroopilly Golf Club in Brisbane fared even worse, dropping 26 spots to number 99. Redesigned by Ross Watson, the Red Nine on Indooroopilly West was a partial construction site during the last ranking period but playing surfaces have since greatly improved. There does remain work to be done on the Gold Nine, however, with the 10th and 11th holes to be completely recreated and the 12th and 13th requiring modifications to greens and bunkers. The 4thand 5th also need further tweaking. It will be a couple of years before the West Course at Indooroopilly is completely finished, and hard to see any large leaps back up the list until there is a more uniform appearance across the holes.

Another notable Queensland project we have been watching is the redevelopment of the Ipswich Golf Club, which now features a new 18-hole Wayne Grady ‘designed’ golf course that opened for play a couple of months back. Ipswich has never appeared on our Top 100, but when they sold off part of their site for a residential development and acquired an adjacent farmland, there must have been high expectations around the club. Given the dramatic nature of the newer land, this project had real potential, but sadly both the design and construction here are very poor. A couple of green sites take a decent picture, but most of Grady’s bunkers are unsightly and un-strategic, while his forced carries, awkward landing areas and the use of a natural creek ravine suggest a lack of real architectural awareness. We will ensure panellist rate the course for our 2012 ranking, but don’t expect it to appear on the Top 100 unless a number of critical issues are addressed.

Although both the Ipswich and Indooroopilly projects involved substantial redesign, most of the other key projects around Australia are much subtler. Work is typically either aimed at restoring lost features and reversing neglect, or involves the soft redesign of problem areas to better tie the whole golfing product together. For established clubs there is always a risk when their designer suggests changes that alter the character of the layout, and in Adelaide right now two of the city’s premier clubs are wrestling with this very dilemma.

At Royal Adelaide Mike Clayton’s new 17th hole opened in February and has done well to completely divide opinion across the industry. The hole asks some serious strategic questions, and will fit better within the Royal Adelaide layout when his other proposed alterations and course enhancements have been implemented as well. These are unlikely in the short-term, as members get used to the 17th and decide internally whether to embrace Clayton’s vision of returning to the spirit of Dr. MacKenzie’s suggested plans from 1926, or abandon reform and instead fine-tune their present, more penal, layout.

Nearby, the Kooyonga Golf Club is continuing with a series of refinements suggested by English architect Dr. Martin Hawtree, whose main focus now is on greens and bunkers. Work over the next year will include a new target at the 6th and modified greenside traps on the 3rd, 6th, 15th and 16th holes. The current board at Kooyonga has handled criticism of previous alterations well, and seems determined to ensure that any future work is in keeping with the nature of the existing track.

Hawtree will also be busy in Melbourne, having been engaged as consulting architect at the Huntingdale Golf Club and with his safety enhancement program now approved at Yarra Yarra. His Yarra Yarra work involves the construction of a new 3rd and 4th hole, in order to shift golf away from the club’s problematic northern boundary. The realignment of these holes will result in some minor adjustments to the bunkering and teeing area on the 7th. Hawtree’s ‘pilot program’ here was completed earlier in the year, and involved moving the 10th green closer to an enlarged dam and reshaping the bunkers that surround the club’s wonderful 15th hole. When working on a cherished course like Yarra Yarra an architect clearly needs to respect the strategic nature of the original holes, and Hawtree’s plan for the 4th is to faithfully recreate Alex Russell’s bedevilling short par three, which was lost many years ago.

At Huntingdale the Hawtree brief is slightly different, as safety issues have less affect on the actual routing of the course, and because the present layout has little original character left to preserve. His first notable change here will come at the par five 14th hole, which will soon include a wetland area near the green and a realigned fairway, as well as a softer putting surface and fewer traps. The exaggerated slopes on the 16th and 17th greens will be flattened as well, while thankfully plans also exist to completely rebuild the charmless par three 15th, described by Hawtree himself as ‘dreadful’. Additionally, the club has embarked on an aggressive vegetation revitalisation program with decorative plantings being removed and 4,500 native trees and shrubs planted across the course to create the sort of natural ‘heathland’ feel that has been sorely missing for years. Huntingdale’s slide down our ranking list hasn’t pleased anyone at this magazine, and we will watch developments closely here.

We also need to keep an eye on the back nine at the adjacent Metropolitan Golf Club, with further revisions due there soon. Mike Clayton remains the consulting designer at Metropolitan, and is also now overseeing a major redevelopment of the underperforming Bonnie Doon golf course in Sydney. Works here will involve incorporating a neighbouring dumpsite into the layout, and shaping the existing sandy undulations into the sort of quality golf course this fine club deserves. Given the nature of the virgin terrain at Bonnie Doon, there are huge expectations on this project and construction is expected to begin in earnest early next year.

You win some, you lose some…

It hasn’t been all good news for Clayton, as he is no longer a consultant at the Portsea Golf Club on Victoria’s Mornington Peninsula, nor will he and new design partner Geoff Ogilvy continue with their redesign of the East Course at Adelaide’s Grange Golf Club. Despite Clayton’s redesign of the West Course being well received, the Grange recently decided they wanted a different feel for the East Course and replaced Clayton with Greg Norman, who won his first professional event here in 1976. The Norman appointment took many by surprise, given he has just moved his Australian design operations from Sydney to Florida and no longer employs a local design team. The task for Norman’s American staff will be to prepare a Masterplan and guide the club through the process of redesign, starting with the holes that haven’t yet been adjusted.

Meanwhile at Portsea, the club’s decision to relocate their clubhouse and sell land around its old site has already resulted in change to the strong dogleg par four 9th, which was shortened recently because its green was too close to the first residential block sold. Expect drastic changes to other beloved holes like the 1st, 2nd and 6th over the coming months. Oddly, this work is likely to be carried out by Cashmore Design, rather than by Clayton and his team, who did such a sterling job redesigning the course last decade.

Other projects for us to watch include Ross Watson’s continued reconstruction of the Palms Course at Sanctuary Cove, the rebuilding of the 14th, 15th and 16th greens at the disappointing Brisbane Golf Club, also by Watson, and Greg Norman’s planned bunkering changes at Pelican Waters in Queensland.

Naturally, most of these projects were planned or approved prior to our recent rankings, and most have less to do with improving on that list and more about providing members with a better golfing facility. While the sale of the Portsea land will naturally upset many Victorian golfers, and unquestionably impact negatively on its ranking, for other clubs the golf course remains its centrepiece and we are pleased to see a number of sensible restoration programs being proposed during this current ranking cycle. Beyond the works listed above, there are plenty of other redesign jobs in the pipeline as well and we will endeavour to bring readers updates from across the country in future months.

Darius Oliver, Architecture Editor

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