What are the trade offs?

[Steve Curry]

Don,

Great stuff!
On the thought of #1 - Just this week a tv program toured a home built with cargo containers at a greatly reduced cost.  Cut them and stacked them to fit.   Maybe that would save some startup $s?

And as to #7 - I would be inclined to start with the 3 holer and expand from there.  This could stand to drive increased interest and anticipation.

Cheers,
Steve

[Nigel Islam]

#5 - be careful with these, they will hold you back

Tom, could you expand on why double greens hold you back? I am not disagreein,  just as a non-architect I am curious.

[Charlie Gallagher]

    "Won't accept the wild greens and scruffy conditions."
     Don, I choked on that a bit.
     Wolf Point's greens are radical, I will agree with that, but that doesn't make them unplayable or disconcerting if they are kept at the correct speeds for the contour and pitch. That would be 10 or there abouts, I would suppose. I guess I must have missed the scruffy conditions. I saw an immediately beguiling golf course that was gorgeously green and open. It was also disorienting in a great way. It immediately made me ponder routes and ask questions. It did that again and again over its 18 holes. Wolf Point is an enormous entertaining puzzle of a course. I can't see how it wouldn't be endlessly interesting. If it browned out a bit and the ground game was still there, well American golfers need to develope a greater sense of what heathland or links golf is.
    If you have a group considering a similar sort of course I trust they will have the courage to follow through. If it is publicly accessable and its anything close to Wolf Point in terms of interest and quality you better believe I will be calling for a tee time. I will be bringing friends too. I would be perfectly happy sitting in a double wide, looking out over the course after a round and sipping on a cold one.

[Charlie_Bell]

These are all good questions to raise with us worldly golf experts, but I think the more important audience is your potential customers.  Some of the answers aren't as specific to site as they are to locale and clientele.  So my one piece of advice is:

How do you think your target golfers would respond to these questions? 

In some places a trailer clubhouse would be embraced while in others it would be shunned.  And so on...

[Charlie Gallagher]

Tom Doak,
 I'm with Nigel; can you educate us on why double greens and fairways might hold a course back? I can see two concerns, one being slower play if the greens and fairways are too small or narrow, the other being potentially greater liability due to the enhanced possibility of injury  because of the  closer proximity of players to each other. Are there other factors as well?

 If the site is large enough, I can see how these problems could be reduced. Of course, that might require larger areas that would have to be shaped, built out, and grassed. They would then have to be maintained and watered too.