St. John's GC in Jacksonville, FL

[Steve_ Shaffer]

A newly reopened public course in Florida shows how creative design can be affordable

It doesn’t require extra money to build compelling architecture. No large budgets are needed to craft challenging green slopes or situate bunkers in perplexing locations. St. Johns Golf Club, a public facility near St. Augustine, Fla., proves the point.
Originally designed in the late 1980s on an often-wet potato farm two miles west of I-95, St. Johns underwent a major remodel in 2022 that transformed its holes—and its essence—from common and merely functional to imaginative, assertive and uncommon.
Ponte Vedra Beach-based architect Erik Larsen, a former longtime associate with Arnold Palmer Course Design, reimagined St. Johns as a collection of provocative greens that take inspiration from the 1910s and ‘20s and the designs of Seth Raynor and Charles Banks. The bunkers are geometrically patterned with flat sand floors and zoysia-banked grass faces stepped into the shoulders of the greens, and the fairways have been expanded to 45 to 60 yards in places to enhance playability and entice golfers to aim for better angles into the greens.
The impetus for the remodel was the replacement of the aging infrastructure, particularly to improve problematic drainage for both the golf holes and surrounding community, on a course that might do north of 60,000 rounds annually despite losing an average of 30 days per year to wet conditions. (At one point St. Johns was a 27-hole complex, but nine holes were shuttered in 2011, and those 80 acres of open space will be allocated for a new fire station and sheriff’s substation.) The bulk of the $8-million budget, the majority procured by St. Johns County from its general and tourist funds, went toward drainage, irrigation and new turf, which is now dry and surprisingly springy.
Read more with pictures:
A newly reopened public course in Florida shows how creative design can be affordable (msn.com)