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Malcolm Mckinnon

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Ran's terrific interview with Tom Paul got me thinking about other situations where a grand house and grounds have been repurposed into a golf club. Some were completely abandoned by the families and the houses became clubhouses.

We have one here in Princeton, NJ where the old Johnson Estate "Jasna Polana" became a TPC with a Gary Player designed course. Don't look for it on anyones "top" anything lists. There has been for a long time a waiting list for members to get out..

http://www.tpcatjasnapolana.com/

Is it possible that Eddie Scott saw what became of this property and got cold feet?

My favorite of this genre is Sleepy Hollow which stands sentry on the east bank of the Hudson River near Sing Sing Prison and the Tappan Zee Bridge. Formally a very, very grand estate which passed through Vanderbilt and Rockefeller family scions the clubhouse is a magnificent Stanford White designed edifice overlooking the Hudson River with it's C.B. MacDonald golf and opulent stables. It was converted over to a golf and country club just over 100 years ago.

http://www.sleepyhollowcc.org/index.cfm

What other grand estates do you know that have become Golf clubs? I'm sure there are bunches more but I can't think of them.

Steve_ Shaffer

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Re: Golden Age Estates that have been converted to golf clubs
« Reply #1 on: May 04, 2012, 11:33:28 PM »
Cold Spring CC on Long Island on the grounds of Oheka, the Otto Kahn estate:

http://www.coldspringcc.org/page.php?Custom%20Pages=6
"Some of us worship in churches, some in synagogues, some on golf courses ... "  Adlai Stevenson
Hyman Roth to Michael Corleone: "We're bigger than US Steel."
Ben Hogan “The most important shot in golf is the next one”

Joel_Stewart

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Re: Golden Age Estates that have been converted to golf clubs
« Reply #2 on: May 04, 2012, 11:47:14 PM »
Burlingame Country Club which is located very close to the San Francisco airport was previously the Crocker Estate.

Steve Lapper

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Re: Golden Age Estates that have been converted to golf clubs
« Reply #3 on: May 05, 2012, 05:43:54 AM »
Paramount CC emerged from the original Adolph Zukor estate.
The conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking."--John Kenneth Galbraith

Patrick_Mucci

Re: Golden Age Estates that have been converted to golf clubs
« Reply #4 on: May 05, 2012, 06:54:15 AM »
Deepdale, the Grace estate

Meadowbrook

TEPaul

Re: Golden Age Estates that have been converted to golf clubs
« Reply #5 on: May 05, 2012, 07:40:06 AM »
Malcolm, your observation is a good one!

I believe it’s one a number of interweaving subjects that explain the background and backdrop of many golf clubs and courses in America. This is an over-all subject I’ve spent much of my time researching and studying in the last few years.

Personally I believe it’s a subject that should begin in the UK from at least the middle of the 19th century (a time that I believe applied golf course architecture actually began) and then proceed forward to the USA which inherited golf around the last decade of the 19th century.

Did the sites used for golf once it began to emigrate out of Scotland en masse influence golf course architecture in various and interesting ways due to this interesting site selection history? It's always a bit dangerous to generalize but I believe it very much did.

If you’d like to discuss it with me I would be happy to.

On the Montgomery Scott Ardrossan Farm subject I put a post to Pat Mucci on Ran’s thread on the first Part of the Feature Interview. I will copy and paste it on here.



Patrick_Mucci

Re: Golden Age Estates that have been converted to golf clubs
« Reply #6 on: May 05, 2012, 08:20:52 AM »
TEPaul,

It's about time you returned to your senses and rejoined GCA.com.

Welcome back.

What's interesting about the private estate course is that these men were so enamored of this new game that they had courses, really good courses, built for them and their peers, on their homes/estates.

T Suffern Tailer, (sp?) Annenberg (sp ?), Otto Kahn (Oheka) and others retained the best architects of the day to craft their courses.

There's certainly a connection between the development of the great early courses in America and the creation of these "on property" courses of such influential men.

There is no doubt that the social connections with these influential men led to the commissions awarded to certain architects.

In relatively modern times, Roxciticus (sp ?) was the former Bliss estate

Tom_Doak

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Re: Golden Age Estates that have been converted to golf clubs
« Reply #7 on: May 05, 2012, 08:38:04 AM »
Tom Paul:

Welcome back!


Patrick M:

Notice that some of those personal courses for the titans of American industry you mentioned, were done by architects who didn't take a fee?


Malcolm:

My initial reaction to your thread is that there have been a ton of these sorts of courses built in Europe [and the UK] over the past 25 years.  The first that comes to mind is Skibo Castle, and its two sister properties in Rhode Island and in the west of England ... but there are also those projects in the north of England a bit south of Edinburgh [can't remember the names], and a couple down around London.  Archerfield, in Scotland, was another, even though the restored house is not the centerpiece of the golf but off to the side.  And the Trump project was built on the site of the Menie estate, which jacked up the price of the land considerably; it just occurs to me that I haven't heard anything about how the old house there fits into his plans.

TEPaul

Re: Golden Age Estates that have been converted to golf clubs
« Reply #8 on: May 05, 2012, 09:02:13 AM »
TomD:

Skibo Castle is another good example of the interesting history of grand estates and eventually golf courses on both sides of the Atlantic as well as the interesting evolutionary American/UK connection in those histories.

Skibo is many centuries old but it was leased and then bought at the end of the 19th century by American industrialist Andrew Carnegie who was of Scottish ancestry. Today it is the Carnegie club.

Another evolution in the same vein is Loch Lomand Club (Weiskopf/Morrish) and its mansion/club house that for centuries was known as Rossdhu Castle.

Ironically, my maternal grandparents rented Rossdhu for a couple of months in the summer for a number of years in the 1920s and early 1930 to take family and friends over there to shoot and such.

Adam Lawrence

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Re: Golden Age Estates that have been converted to golf clubs
« Reply #9 on: May 05, 2012, 09:06:13 AM »
Yeah, there's loads in the UK. Martin Hawtree built a course in a Repton-designed park at Rudding House in Yorkshire in the nineties. There's an old nine holer inside Capability Brown's park at Stowe in Northamptonshire. I play at the new Heythrop Park course in Oxfordshire, a hugely historic estate because it's believed to be where the 'English style' of landscapes began to emerge at the start of the eighteenth century. Luton Hoo in Bedfordshire has its course partly in a grade 1 listed Brown park. David Kidd is supposed to be building a new course at Cherkley Court in Surrey, former home of Lord Beaverbrook, the newspaper tycoon and wartime government minister. Loch Lomond is an obvious example in Scotland, Taymouth Castle too. And most of the modern upmarket Irish parkland courses are in historic demesnes.

Golf isn't a bad solution for these parks IMO. Many of them are historic landscapes, though, and protected to a greater or lesser degree, so you have to accept that there are restrictions on what can be done in certain areas. At Heythrop, for example, Tom Mackenzie had to route the course while putting much of the original tree planting back in place, and no visible golfing features were allowed within site of the main house - so the eleventh hole, which plays down the south lawn, and the eighteenth, which is in the Grand Avenue, are both just what the land gave.
Adam Lawrence

Editor, Golf Course Architecture
www.golfcoursearchitecture.net

Principal, Oxford Golf Consulting
www.oxfordgolfconsulting.com

Author, 'More Enduring Than Brass: a biography of Harry Colt' (forthcoming).

Short words are best, and the old words, when short, are the best of all.

Jeff_Mingay

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Re: Golden Age Estates that have been converted to golf clubs
« Reply #10 on: May 05, 2012, 09:17:10 AM »
Tom Doak:

Seeing Tom Paul listed as a 'newbie' is also kinda like seeing Trotsky listed as a new member of the Communist Party ;D
jeffmingay.com

Ally Mcintosh

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Re: Golden Age Estates that have been converted to golf clubs
« Reply #11 on: May 05, 2012, 09:20:11 AM »
Almost every Irish high-end course of the last 25 years was built on an old country estate.

There are a lot of them but here are some of the better known ones:

K-Club
Mount Juliet
Druid's Glen
Powerscourt
Adare
Killeen Castle
Carton House
Farnham
Moyvalley

Tom_Doak

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Re: Golden Age Estates that have been converted to golf clubs
« Reply #12 on: May 05, 2012, 09:24:58 AM »
I went through this thread so fast that I forgot to even mention the two projects of ours that were part of old estates.

The Village Club of Sands Point, NY, is on the old Guggenheim estate.  It had been repurposed as a corporate retreat by IBM in the 1950's, when Robert Trent Jones built a nine-hole course; and then IBM sold it to the town in the 90's, and the town hired us to turn it into 18 holes.  Unfortunately, the design was more compromised by politics than all the other projects I've ever done, put together.

Sebonack was built on the Charles Sabin estate, whose house was on the 18th fairway -- the swimming pool was in the hollow which is now a cross-hazard on #18.  The mansion was beautiful -- we had a couple of early meetings about the project there -- but it would have cost just as much to refurbish it as to build a new clubhouse higher up the hill, which allowed us to use more of the bay frontage for golf [and to hide the parking lots from view].  So Mr. Pascucci got permission to tear down the mansion, but only after commissioning $200,000 worth of photography to document it all.

Patrick_Mucci

Re: Golden Age Estates that have been converted to golf clubs
« Reply #13 on: May 05, 2012, 09:41:36 AM »
Tom,

Was the routing compromised by politics or did it seep down deeper, to the hole and feature level ?

Patrick_Mucci

Re: Golden Age Estates that have been converted to golf clubs
« Reply #14 on: May 05, 2012, 09:46:50 AM »
Tom,

One of the things that always perplexed me about Sebonack was not the siting of the clubhouse, but the siting of the cabins and the parking lot.

Those seemed like prime sites/locations for golf, not parked cars or views of pitch blackness at night.


Robert Emmons

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Re: Golden Age Estates that have been converted to golf clubs
« Reply #15 on: May 05, 2012, 10:21:19 AM »
The North Shore of Long Island has many:

Munttontown
Pine Hollow
Cold Spring
Westbury
Glenn Oaks
Deepdale
Mill River

Most built in the 50's and 60's...RHE

Malcolm Mckinnon

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Re: Golden Age Estates that have been converted to golf clubs
« Reply #16 on: May 05, 2012, 10:28:31 AM »
I read in yesterday's NY Times that the old Duke estate in Hillsborough, NJ is opening up their grounds to the public. Perhaps there could be a commission to be found there?

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/04/arts/doris-dukes-farm-hillsborough-nj-opening-to-public.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all

What better way to promote conservation than a new golf course sans real estate development?

TEPaul

Re: Golden Age Estates that have been converted to golf clubs
« Reply #17 on: May 05, 2012, 10:43:02 AM »
Adam Lawrence:

I would strongly encourage you to continue to develop as much as you can what you touched on in the first paragraph of your #9.

I say that because I believe we must appreciate so much more the basic chronologies of some of the things that influenced golf course architecture! And one of the very best ways to do that is to put those things (such as classic English landscape architecture) into a basic historic TIMELINE and then compare and contrast it to the basic historical timeline of applied golf course architecture!

The fact is classic English landscape architecture, and particularly on a grand scale (those massive Scottish and English estates) actually PRECEDED applied golf course architecture by up to perhaps 150 years.

Lancelot “Capability” Brown does seem to receive much of the credit for developing certain aspects of classic English landscape architecture but he was by no means the only one or the first and last one to develop it. Before him we must consider the likes of Charles Bridgeman and particularly William Kent. Brown came somewhat after them and he is credited with developing the so-called “Serpentine” line (curvilinear). His style was far more “natural” or representative of the various lines and look of Nature than the geometric lines and angles of Greek and Roman early “classic” landscape architecture that preceded classic English landscape architecture by a thousand years. Nevertheless, Brown’s style was still quite the “idealized” representation of Nature. The significant English landscape architect, Humphrey Repton, took the style to another and even more naturalized level.

But the real irony seems to be that some of those early (19th century) UK golf courses that were put on some of those UK massive estates that had the classic English landscape architecture designs of the likes of Kent, Brown and Repton first used some very geometric angles, lines and designs in their golf architectural features.

Therefore, it seems to have taken some time and perhaps some osmosis for golf architects and architecture to begin to pick up on and use some of the types and styles of the classic English landscape architecture that preceded it-----particularly with the use in golf architecture of Brown’s “Serpentine” line and curvilinear angles.
« Last Edit: May 05, 2012, 10:49:56 AM by TEPaul »

Steve Burrows

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Re: Golden Age Estates that have been converted to golf clubs
« Reply #18 on: May 05, 2012, 12:09:26 PM »
One might also argue that the connection between the game of golf and such estates/pleasure grounds is precisely what precludes golf from regaining any sense of its democratic roots, particularly in America.  Historically, the elite classes have held a critical role in the establishment and maintenance of socio-cultural relationships, so once golf became associated with the "titans of industry, (however constructed or imagined that relationship was), they had effectively claimed it for themselves.  We live with that cultural legacy today, as well as a physical legacy, vis a vis the landscape aesthetic left to us by Repton and Brown (among others), as well as their patrons.
...to admit my mistakes most frankly, or to say simply what I believe to be necessary for the defense of what I have written, without introducing the explanation of any new matter so as to avoid engaging myself in endless discussion from one topic to another.     
               -Rene Descartes

Patrick_Mucci

Re: Golden Age Estates that have been converted to golf clubs
« Reply #19 on: May 05, 2012, 12:38:07 PM »

One might also argue that the connection between the game of golf and such estates/pleasure grounds is precisely what precludes golf from regaining any sense of its democratic roots, particularly in America. 

 Historically, the elite classes have held a critical role in the establishment and maintenance of socio-cultural relationships, so once golf became associated with the "titans of industry, (however constructed or imagined that relationship was), they had effectively claimed it for themselves. 

We live with that cultural legacy today, as well as a physical legacy, vis a vis the landscape aesthetic left to us by Repton and Brown (among others), as well as their patrons.


Steve,

Those fellows were the ones who could afford to import golf in terms of creating the fields of play.

There was no ban or import duty on creating golf courses in America.
State, county and local governments could have done so if they were so inclined, but, they weren't, because the DEMAND wasn't there.

The demand had its genesis with those fellows and their peers.
They essentially made the market, narrow at first, but ever expanding until recenlty.


Alex Lagowitz

Re: Golden Age Estates that have been converted to golf clubs
« Reply #20 on: May 05, 2012, 01:36:41 PM »
Trump Bedminister NJ was originally an estate owned by DeLorean.

Tiger_Bernhardt

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Re: Golden Age Estates that have been converted to golf clubs
« Reply #21 on: May 05, 2012, 04:31:12 PM »
Great topic is somehow we can keep trump out of it.

Bill_McBride

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Re: Golden Age Estates that have been converted to golf clubs
« Reply #22 on: May 05, 2012, 04:53:41 PM »
Yeah, there's loads in the UK. Martin Hawtree built a course in a Repton-designed park at Rudding House in Yorkshire in the nineties. There's an old nine holer inside Capability Brown's park at Stowe in Northamptonshire. I play at the new Heythrop Park course in Oxfordshire, a hugely historic estate because it's believed to be where the 'English style' of landscapes began to emerge at the start of the eighteenth century. Luton Hoo in Bedfordshire has its course partly in a grade 1 listed Brown park. David Kidd is supposed to be building a new course at Cherkley Court in Surrey, former home of Lord Beaverbrook, the newspaper tycoon and wartime government minister. Loch Lomond is an obvious example in Scotland, Taymouth Castle too. And most of the modern upmarket Irish parkland courses are in historic demesnes.

Golf isn't a bad solution for these parks IMO. Many of them are historic landscapes, though, and protected to a greater or lesser degree, so you have to accept that there are restrictions on what can be done in certain areas. At Heythrop, for example, Tom Mackenzie had to route the course while putting much of the original tree planting back in place, and no visible golfing features were allowed within site of the main house - so the eleventh hole, which plays down the south lawn, and the eighteenth, which is in the Grand Avenue, are both just what the land gave.

Adam, I think Brocket Hall is another and more recent.   I played there twice in 1995 on arrival day after landing at Heathrow.   Other than the ferry rides across the river and the long par 4s that criss cross across the river, I didn't find it particularly compelling.   I only played the Peter Allis course, the second 18 wasn't built yet.   One interesting mandate to the architect:  none of the bunkers could be visible from the stately manor house, now a conference center.   

Craig Disher

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Re: Golden Age Estates that have been converted to golf clubs
« Reply #23 on: May 05, 2012, 05:03:54 PM »
The only course in the DC area that was converted from what I'd consider an estate is Manor. The clubhouse, built in 1861, housed a series of wealthy families including one headed by a past governor of Pennsylvania and mayor of Philadelphia. The clubhouse survived until it burned in the early 1950s; Flynn's 18 holes lasted a bit longer.


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