Seeing as it mentions 2 of the above points, here is a 10 point guide to building a world class golf course (originally published in Golf Digest Ireland)...
1. Hire a professional golf course architect
Like in any career, there are good golf course architects and there are not so good ones. But there is one thing for certain: playing golf professionally for a living has no relationship whatsoever with being able to design a high quality golf course. Firstly, very few golf professionals actually design the courses they put their names to: They certainly may have ideas but the routing, the detail, the finished product – someone else is usually doing that. Secondly, if you discount Ben Crenshaw (who shares equal billing with his partner Bill Coore), then only 5% of the World Top 100 courses have been designed by a professional golfer, even nominally. So their strike rate isn’t particularly good either.
2. Build on sand
To a golf architect, getting the chance to design a course on a sandy site is like being offered the keys to the kingdom. It is no coincidence that golf was first played on the links of Scotland: The same qualities that render dunes useless as arable farming land make them ideal for golf. Firm and fast conditions are easy to obtain and most importantly of all, the free draining nature of the soil means that any features can be laid out naturally without having to be forced. With a few notable exceptions (Augusta National being one), the world’s best inland courses are also based on sand, from Cypress Point and Pine Valley in the States to the heathland gems of Surrey and the Australian sand-belt courses such as Royal Melbourne.
3. Find the right topography
If you build your course amongst flat fields, the contours will have to be artificially created. Aside from costing more to move earth and generate some interesting undulation, no team is as skilled as nature herself at providing good golfing land. Pick a site with existing mounds, valleys, humps and hollows and the end product should reap the reward.
4. Remember the natural landscape
The playing area of a golf course will generally take up only a minority of the overall site footprint. Integrating that area in to its natural surroundings is fundamental if golfers are to feel at peace with the landscape they are golfing in. If your golf course is lined with row upon row of real estate then it’s highly unlikely that it will ever get near the world’s top-100; unless - like Pebble Beach – it has its drama on the ocean edge.
5. Don’t compromise for the professionals
Top tour golfers are a different breed to the rest of us and so they need a different, more penal type of golf course to challenge them. But even the courses on the British Open rota only host the elite every eight or nine years. So why do we feel the need to keep on altering them for those four days a decade? And why do we feel the need to build 6,700 metre tees for new courses that are squarely aimed at member and green-fee play and will never even sniff a professional tournament? Longer rounds, extra cost: Pointless. Pacific Dunes is the only world Top-20 course to be built this century and it plays 6,000 metres from the very back.
6. Build it with cool season grasses
There are very few world Top-100 golf courses that play all year round on warm season grasses such as bermuda or zoysia. Most of the best courses are built in a cool season climate which allows fine grasses such as bent and fescue to thrive, resulting in slicker playing surfaces.
7. Keep the views
Just because you are building an inland golf course doesn’t mean that you need to crowd it out with tree planting. All of the early courses were built with long views in mind, which were crucial in adding to the playability and scale of the site. In recent years, many of the famous heathland courses of England (e.g. Sunningdale) have been cutting down their trees to restore the original open heath whilst some of the classic American courses such as Oakmont have undergone similar tree-clearing exercises. At the seaside, Dooks golf club in Kerry recently removed a large number of pines from the perimeter of their course, opening up some of the most fantastic 360 degree views to be found anywhere. It must have seemed such an obvious decision in hindsight.
8. Spend your maintenance budget on the things that matter
Surveys repeatedly tell us that golfers prioritise good conditioning above all other factors when choosing where they should part with green fees. So we know maintenance is a crucial element in generating business. But for those clubs that have limited funds, the important areas are the fairways, greens and approaches. Spending money on cart paths, flora, car parks and clubhouses won’t make the golf course any better and it is the golf course you want people to be talking about when they leave.
9. Make sure it stays open
It perhaps should be beyond mention but you can’t have a world class golf course if it no longer exists. Many fantastic courses have been consigned to the history books, most of them because of depression, war, urban sprawl or adopting the wrong business model. There were 600 closures last year in the USA alone.
10. Build it one hundred years ago
OK, so this is not a particularly easy tip to follow but it rings true. Good sites were ten-a-penny back in the golden age because there were very few planning restrictions. In the last twenty years in particular, new environmental codes have correctly ensured that it has become more difficult to build a golf course on any bit of available land. The old architects also had the advantage of designing in an age where there were fewer preconceptions of how golf courses should look and play. In the current commercial era where money is king, it is far harder to be innovative as the risk of failure is considered a risk not worth taking.