Darius Oliver is trying to get paid as a "golf architecture consultant" by recommending architects to developers. It's a tricky business, because there will always be more money in recommending guys who will pay you a fee to recommend them. Plus, a developer who needs Darius' help in selecting an architect may not turn out to be the best client.
The article about his own signature design firm was a parody, though they say that any parody usually contains a least a few grains of aspiration, too. I suspect that Darius would like to design a golf course himself someday, much as Geoff Shackelford does. But, heck, so does nearly everyone on this web site.
Teaser:
Coore began work on Lost Farm in Easter 2006. He spent weeks studying every nuance of the property, searching for ways of tying all the golf together. Coore, a hands-on architect, spent much longer on site than Doak did for the original course, partly because the routing of Lost Farm, across higher dunes, is more complicated. The valleys between the dunes are also broader and the site available for golf was larger and stretched farther inland.
These factors gave Coore the opportunity to do something Doak would have loved to do on his course: arrange the golf so the holes run to all points of the compass, rather than predominantly east and west. On the downside, he had to figure a way of setting golf among such enormous sandhills without making it unplayable.
I don't know that the routing of Lost Farm was more complicated than Barnbougle Dunes. We looked at a lot of different possibilities for Barnbougle, even though the site for the front nine was quite narrow and restricted ... it seemed barely wide enough to get out and back, yet we squeezed a lot into it. Plus, Bill didn't have to deal with Greg Ramsay trying to route holes for him!
I will take the comments about Bill spending so much more time on site than me, with a grain of salt. If I hadn't been willing to build the first course without much payment, Bill would not have been paid to spend so much time on the sequel. I am positive that Lost Farm is an excellent course -- Darius has it rated equal with Barnbougle on a hole-by-hole comparison on his web site -- and I certainly look forward to playing them both someday soon and comparing.
One could also use the time sheets to conclude that I get a lot more out of a day's work than Bill does, or else that my crew adds more value than his.
In truth, we are just a bit more different than most people realize. But the only thing that matters is whether the golf courses we are building get as much out of the land as they could, and we both seem to be doing okay in that regard.