Grant,
I am personally sort of flattered that you would draw comparison with Cal Club and a restored look at Augusta. Both places have expansive fairway cuts, and were Designed / Re-designed by The Good Doctor with very interesting bunker shapes and fun playing angles. While I see your point about mixing "sweet and savory", I think you have mislabeled Cal Club. Maybe you visited at the wrong time, did you visit? We are only really "green" following a quarterly fertilization, and enjoy the burnt out tones of fine fescue natives, as well as predominantly fine fescue often off color playing surfaces, and bunker edges the rest of the year. Personally I prefer a more natural look, like I feel we do well here at Cal Club. I would be totally for it if a place like Augusta were to get back to their old shapes. Universally, I worry about your comment "anything short of an immaculately edged bunker would stick out". Yikes, I would prefer to never again see "immaculately edged" HAZARDS.
Cal Club's calling card is its fine fescue playing surfaces, true greens, generous tee ball landing areas, numerous and well placed bunkers, tricky second shots and natural presentation being all about golf. We try to make it as natural and links like as we can, but do allow carts, which makes that a tougher task than at a Ballyneal or Bandon. Seasonally our conditions vary a little, but overall we are very low input and low maintenance on fairways, tees, approaches, bunkers as well. That is one of the many beauties of fine fescue, it grows slowly and doesn't require much fertility or trimming in comparison with other grasses. You won't catch us Armor All-ing sprinkler heads, fertilizing each fortnight or even every month or two, dying turf green, or edging our natural cart paths. As the assistant greenskeeper here, and guy who shaped a small handful of these bunkers and now help maintain them, I am a bit salted and surprised by your nomination of Cal Club as being in this category. "Highly manicured fairways" are three words I have never heard together to describe Cal Club. In respect to the bunkers, we began a couple years after the project to selectively let sections of them grow out and pop seedheads more...after the initial grow-in fertility had worn off. Before that it just wouldn't work.
Thanks,
Josh Smith
Now a few photos to from my cellphone to offset your implication...(most of my cell phone photos of Cal Club are things we need to improve, but here are a few decent ones that might highlight a bit more of our naturalness as opposed to highly manicured)