Trying to come up wit a design for a short game area with limited space available. Ideas ? Pictures?
It seems like the starting point is whether you want a central green and players hitting in from all sides, or players hitting from the middle towards a number of greens out on the edges.
Winged foot has the latter, which I suppose requires a little more room than the former:
Particularly if there's only one green, I think the real trick is ensuring that you have 360° of shots that are actually appealing to practice. It's hard to design a green that plays differently, but equally interestingly, from 360° around it. If you design a normal green oriented towards the "front", then you'll have a lot of unappealing shots from over the "back" of the green. Not that many golfers want to simulate playing from over a green. If you have a setup like Winged Foot's, it's easier to design "normal" greens with a more defined front and back.
The short game practice area at my college was not especially well designed, so I have some experience with this. The "front" of the green (the low point, basically) was backed up against the edge of the property, so most of the available shots were from the sides and what felt like "over the back". It wasn't good. The two greens on opposite sides of the property sloped east and west but had entrances from the south — again, it just didn't leave many opportunities to replicate normal golf shots you'd actually face a lot on the course.