I will go out on a limb (a fairly strong limb) and argue that maintenance costs for a golf course are one of single biggest influences on design. EVERY course is concerned about maintenance, but NOT EVERY course is concerned about maintenance “costs”. If an architect is lucky enough to get a project where they don’t have to worry about the cost of maintenance this presents huge design advantages over projects where they do because their design options are almost limitless. And yes all architects on all projects need to be sure that what they design is “maintainable” at any cost, but some don’t have to worry how much that cost will be. There are huge design advantages if you don’t have to worry about green size or green side hazard placement or worry about hand mowing or triplex mowing or tee size or the number of bunkers or whether the bunkers can be hand raked or must be machine raked or how much fairway acreage they have or how much water they can use or how much irrigation they can install (or how much turf must be irrigated) or how many trees they can add (or remove), …, and the list goes on and on.
Maintenance costs are a BIG factor for the far majority of golf courses and architects that have to deal with tightening budgets (and most are tightening) have to incorporate this into their design considerations. If you beg to disagree, think of it this way, do you think Michael Pascucci told Tom and Jack to be weary of what it was going to cost to maintain Sebonack once it was finished? I don’t think so.
Maintenance costs/budgets play a big role in renovations/restorations as well. Design features tend to “shrink” over time. Bunkers get smaller, greens get smaller, fairways get narrower, tees shrink,… Restoring most of these features tends to add to maintenance costs (not always but often) as bigger bunkers means more sand (and with classic bunkers often hand raking), larger greens means more maintenance, fairway grass is more expensive to maintain than rough,…and so on.
Managing design with maintenance costs presents a huge challenge for most architects!