Thanks everyone far all your welcoming words and comments.
Here are some answers to your diverse questions:
I live in the 8th arrondissement, it’s very central but my favorite is the 7th.
I played Nîmes-Campagne 10 years ago. It’s a good course designed in 1968 by Donald Harradine and Léonard Morandi. Probably one of the best courses built in France in this dark period for golf architecture. Always had a good reputation, nice environment, not worth a trip across the Atlantic but certainly the best course in this area.
French golf market:
I think we need to get better at both ends of the market. No problem with the middle market where a large majority of our courses stand at the moment:
• Our best courses need to get better (renovated design + improved maintenance) to really establish the country as a leading golf destination. Not only we have a great number of pre-war/classic courses, including those from Colt & Simpson, but we also have good “new” courses from Van Hagge, Trent Jones (& Jr.), Dye, Bill Coore etc. It’s exactly what we do with Frank in le Touquet and Hardelot, we try to take both courses to the top of their potential, bringing them from “great French courses” to “great courses by international standards”. Hosting the Ryder Cup and having the Evian Masters as a Major tournament will surely help improve our image as a top golf country.
• At the other end, we need to promote golf to populations who don’t have access to the game. That means new facilities near the cities, probably shorter courses, faster and less expensive to play, easier as well, and with a non-country club atmosphere. In France, non-golfers have a lot of prejudices towards golf: they see it as an elite game (not even a sport) for rich and old people and they couldn’t be more wrong because we have a lot of kids embracing the game and most people you meet on the courses are far from being rich. Hopefully hosting the Ryder Cup in 2018 will create a good dynamic. The French Golf Federation is committed to building new affordable facilities, but everything seems a little frozen with the crisis.
My skills as an architect:
I have a lot to learn of course since my academic background is Business School/Philosophy/History of Architecture. I am getting better with Autocad day by day, but so far I am only at the 2D stage. My first experience “in the dirt” was last autumn renovating bunkers, re-routing cart paths and supervising tree cuts: for that we didn’t draw 3D plans. But we will when we get to modifying greens and I’m gonna learn it from Frank. We also spent a lot of time looking into archives, finding old aerial pictures and then walking both courses in order to read traces from the past and determine how we would like to renovate them.
Agronomy wise, I am no less of a newcomer. I have already learnt a lot about sward, rootzone and perched water table. I read books on the subject, GCA magazine is great too, I talk a lot to green keepers when I meet them and so it goes…
I also have followed some French architects while they were working on site and learnt a lot from watching them and talking to them.
I think I have all it takes to be a golf architect: passion for the game, a good eye, a passion for nature and beauty, a sense of details and to tell you the truth, I really enjoyed my time “in the dirt”. Now I still have a lot to learn of course but I am a fast learner + it will come with time.
And finally, a lot of French courses have been built on inert landfills (and sometimes less inert…). Golf National is one of those. They had trucks coming in from everywhere for 2 years before they could actually start shaping. There is a new cheap synthetic 9 holes course in the South of Paris that was almost totally financed by incomes from receiving landfills…