St. Andrews No. 7, Daivd Kidd, Bandon Dunes "our aim is to take your breath away

[cary lichtenstein]

Interesting article and picture in lastest issue of "Links: The Architecture Issue"

Has an interview and photograph of St. Andrews No. 7. A dead flat piece of land, not sand based, was an old potato farm.

Kidd is restoriing the land pre french fries to the old, crumpled, rugged, wrinkled look it had, moving 350,000 cubic yards of dirt in the process.

He describes the process as a 3 step one. What I find kind of interesting, is if this works, it opens up such possiblities for us here in Florida and other areas where the land is awful at best.

It looks very different from what Pete Dye did at Whistling Straits.

[David_Tepper]

Cary -

Someone posted some "before & after" pix of Kingsbarns here a year or two ago. I have never seen the property in person, but the transformation (based on those and other pix I have seen) from flat, featureless farmland to a links golf course was impressive.

If Mr. Kidd does as well at SA#7, that will be great.

Mark Parsinen is in the process of doing another project (Castle Stuart) similar to Kingsbarns, near the Inverness Airport in the Highlands.

DT  

[Steve_Roths]

I believe that Pacific Trails is also on Kyle Phillips to do list.  God I hope they don't actually call it Pacific Trails, though.  You have Pacific Dunes as one of the 15 greatest courses in the world why would you want to dilute the value of that name in any way?  

[RJ_Daley]

It is all about the soil and drainage, Cary.  Somehow, I think that the more unremarkable land you speak of in FL is a bit closer to water tables, and tougher to drain than the land at SA-7 or Kingsbarns. The fact that they are not on traditional linksland, being a potato farm (similar to parts of Friars Head) doesn't address the drainability of that land in FL.  

[Tom_Doak]

I was out on the site for #7 briefly in October.  David wasn't there but I got a tour from someone in the Links Trust.  The shaping looked pretty radical to me.

Cary, there is about 100 feet of tilt from the top end of the site down to cliffs at the water's edge, so I don't think anything they are doing is going to apply to Florida.

[Robert Thompson]

Tom: I assume you aren't using the word "radical" as a skater would use it. So what exactly do you mean?

[Joel_Stewart]

I believe that Pacific Trails is also on Kyle Phillips to do list.  

If you are talking about the architect for the 4th course at Bandon, then I'm not sure its Kyle Phillips (although he would be a good choice).   Mike has a handshake agreement with Mark Parsinian if he can "put together the Kingsbarn team" and the main person is Kyle Phillips.  It is well known that Mark and Kyle are not on the best of terms so the architect is up in the air.  Mark is trying to pitch Mike Keiser on another team and Kyle has talked with Keiser as well.  We probably won't know until later this year.