Renovation vs. Restoration

[grandwazo]

As usual, I need some help.  

For those of you with the expertise...how would you try to explain to someone the difference between a renovation of a golf course vs. the restoration of a golf course.  

Keep in mind the golf course in question is a non descript early 1960's design with no pedigree that over the past 45 years has only been modified by green committees whose main intent was to speed play and reduce errant shots from leaving the premises.  The nicest comments made by members and guests alike is that the existing golf course is "pretty" and that the flowers are beautiful.

The renovation plan we are about to undertake fundamentally changes the design and feel of the golf course, while maintaining the existing routing.  Certain interested parties are hoping to maintain and preserve the existing course for no other reason than their own prior involvement in the status quo and are causing grief politically.

The work is happening regardless, I am just having a hard time explaining the process at hand and getting the core principle at work understood, i.e. the majority of the membership wanted something new, something they could take pride in, something more substantial than "pretty" and something that could draw new members in a very competitive club business environment.

[Jason Mandel]

Grandwazzo,

What your club is doing sounds very similar to the work we did at White Manor.  Feel free to email me or IM and I can go into detail as to what was done and how it was all explained to the membership.

Jason Mandel

[Forrest Richardson]

A renovation typicaly improves conditions via a re-building of features or areas. It does this independent of restoring, usually.

A restoration returns a course — or part thereof — to a specific time.

A remodel can accomplish both.

A rehabilitation...

A rerouting...

A transformation...

A rebuild...

[TEPaul]

It only matters what you do, not what you call it. There are a number on this website who seem fixated on creating very specific definitions of terms that must be followed on various projects. I don't think it really matters that much to clubs out there doing these projects what the projects are called.

At my Ross course we did what I refer to as a restoration but obviously it wasn't a totally pure one as Gil Hanse did add a couple of bunkers that frankly made two holes play better and more interesting than they ever had. Hanse certainly did remove a lot of so-called "committee add-on" features that'd happened over the years and he removed the work of other architects where he could and he was also not allowed by the club to restore some of the Ross features that had been removed over the years.

Hanse also went with the restoration of a few Maxwell redesigns on a few of our holes.

So what do you call our project? A restoration, a partial restoration, a dual architect rennovation or something else?

Who really cares what you call it---just look at what we did and analyze the effect of it. Our membership in the beginning of the project didn't like the sound of the word "restoration" at that point so we began to refer to it as an "improvement" plan even if nothing changed as to what we and Gil Hanse decided to do.

But to me a real restoration of a golf course of an original architect is putting back precisely what that original architect did on that course originally. Is that always the right thing to do? Every golf club pretty much needs to decide that on their own, in my opinion, and to do that correctly they pretty much need to carefully analyze the entire architectural evolution of their golf course from its beginning to date. Some can't do that for obvious reasons while others can to some degree of accuracy.

[Stuart Hallett]

There is another R word I like to use which sums up most of the many terms, and is less scary than the word Improvement when talking to members,

Revitalisation.