What does the owner want?

[Ronald Montesano]

I'm in the midst of writing a wee article on Chautauqua golf club's 36 holes and practice facility and I cannot keep from waking up in a cold sweat, screaming "Hassenplug, why Hassenplug?" The Hill course was opened in the mid 1990s...surely there were better options than Xenophon/Xanadau/Onesipherous, whatever his name was.

Then I remember, we built a state university campus in swamps OUTSIDE the city; we built a football stadium OUTSIDE the city; we have a knack for simply doing the wrong thing at the right time, so Hassenplug should not surprise me.

I'll be down at Chautauqua next weekend for 36 holes of photography and golf. I'll play the Lake course and try to discern which 9 (if any) are DJ Ross's and which 9 are not. I'll play the 18 holes of the Hill course and try to make some sense of Hassenplug. And I'll ask myself, time and again, what might XXXXX or YYYY have done with this piece of land, back when their careers were in the fledgling stages....

So is this a thread? Who knows! Maybe the question I'm asking is, what does the owner want? Who in her/his right mind would hire Hassenplug? For what purpose, to what end?

[Tom_Doak]

Ronald:

Fifteen years ago, it used to drive me crazy that we couldn't get jobs like the one you are describing, and that owners seemed more comfortable making the same choice their neighbor had, even though the neighbor's course was nothing to write home about.  I just couldn't understand their perspective.

Here's their perspective:

1.  Owners are naturally inclined to hire somebody to build the course who is approximately the same age they are -- which always makes it hard for young designers to break in.

2.  Only ten percent of owners really care about building something outstanding enough to take a risk to do it.  Most simply want something that's okay, so they go with the guy who has a longer track record of building something okay.  They actually think a young guy will waste their money trying to make the course cool.  A young architect has to explain that making something cool does not necessarily make it any harder to play or more expensive to build.

[Steve_ Shaffer]

Hassenplug did a nearby local muni - Five Ponds- which is very busy. www.5pondsgc.com


Probably the lowest responsible bidder.

[Mike_Young]

An owner rarely knows what he wants and a board almost never knows what they want....and that's ok until they get in the middle and start with input without justification....recently I have seen a rework where one nine is totally different from the other...I don't know if it was owner input after they saw one side or if it was a different shaper or if it was the architect....but it let's you know there was some discussion...

[Adrian_Stiff]

I think I just lost a 9 hole par 3 course job where the owner got someone else on price. He is happy with his two 18 hole courses I have already built but another designer undercut my price by £10,000. I was £22,000, which included outline design, detailed green plans and (40 half day) site visits. I's close to me and my normal price would be £40,000 if I had to travel.  I visited a course today that I built three new holes for in 1998, the membership tell me they are best holes and I thought in the passing 13 years they now fit the rest of the course. They recently built a new hole but did not ask me...... what I dont understand is that the new architect has designed a green with a totally different bunker style to the rest of the course..... Tom's right when he says only 10% seem to care or have any sort of real focus on the architecture. There was a great article I read the other day when people were asked what they looked for in their ideal golf club.... A barmaid with great tits got several mentions.

[Jud_T]

Obviously price is an important factor, but it seems to me that price is really the present value of all future cash flows the club may see and the quality and fun of the course are critical to success.  I've seen clubs on great pieces of property in good locations go begging later because a wealthy owner did it his way and everyone sits around 10-15 years later scratching their heads wondering why people aren't lining up to pay top dollar to share in the owner's vision...

[Jeff_Brauer]

Tricks,

Obviously, if any of us gca knew what owners wanted, really wanted, we would each get 100% of our respective (public, private, high end, low end) jobs.  As noted, they only really know they need a golf course, and often make a "safe" decision.

Like Tom Doak, and others, I go crazy trying to figure out how some new guy gets jobs when there are so many qualified gca's out there.  Or, how some guys who are deemed "qualified" go on forever without ever really changing their design style.  One example, I toured a course and drove the cart right into one of the invisible, almost flat bunkers the designer had put in his last ten courses that I had seen.  How can he or potential owners look at those and not see something is very wrong?

I once lost a project to a then new design firm.  I offered to have the committee go see my work and they replied that a trip like that might unduly influence the decision.  Huh?  How else would you make a decision?  In that case, it turned out to be hiring a pro based firm, because they like jock sniffiing, I gathered.

Short version, not all design decisions get made for the right criteria, especially those made by committee.  Whats the old saying about committees - they start out to design a horse and get a zebra, or something like that?

Thanks for listening to my rant......

[Ronald Montesano]

but still, Xen Hassenplug? Not a pro name...not a guy with any track record...not part of a firm...no real search engines back then to pull up his name...how the hell did they find him?

[Chris Cupit]

As an owner who went through the process of picking someone here was my method:

I knew what I liked based on having played a lot of golf across the country and a little overseas.

I knew that in my market I did not have the financial resources to compete head to head if I duplicated what everyone else was doing.

On a hunch and a lot of gut, I bet my family's club's success on creating something very different that would have a large enough audience to appeal to while knowing I would lose others who would never "get it".

After speaking with four very different architects I went with the one that I felt most closely shared my vision for what could be done within my budget and within the constraints of my existing course.  I was the one who tended to say "why don't we do this or let's make it even bigger, deeper, more severe..." and he was the expert who while willing to truly create something unique in my area, had the expertise to reign in some of my really dumbass notions.  He would explain why certain things would or would not work.

Also, I was looking for someone who I knew, based on his past work with others, had the time and the work ethic to spend a lot of time on site.  Being local was a HUGE thing for me.  I believe now more than ever that it is the amount of time spent every day on the little things that make all the difference.  I realize other firms may have excellent staff, shapers, assistants who can genuinely create the vision of the architect but I had a unique opportunity to have the architect himself spend a lot of time on site and I am thrilled with the results.

My big thing now that I really think about it was wanting an architect that would let me particpate to a large extent in bouncing my ideas off of and being able to have a daily conversation about how things were going.  He was more than willing to put up with me.   

[Jeff_Brauer]

The following is an excerpt from "The Architects of Golf" by Geoffery S. Cornish and Ronald E. Whitten (1993)

Xen Hassenplug attended Ohio Wesleyan University and Toledo University, majoring in civil engineering. His first experience in golf course construction came in 1946, when he was involved in planning irrigation and seeding of an 18 hole course planned by J. B. McGovern at Overbrook CC near Philadelphia. McGovern became ill during construction of the course, and Hassenplug went on to complete the 18 holes and then to assist golf architect Dick Wilson on two other Pennsylvania projects, Radnor Valley near Philadelphia and Westmoreland CC near Pittsburgh. Upon completion of these layouts, Hassenplug entered private practice, combining golf course design, land planning, irrigation and civil engineering. Ed Beidel joined him in his practice in the 1980s.



I had the pleasure of meeting Xen years ago at an ASGCA meeting.  Very nice guy, so you could see why an owner might like him, or the owner may have realized his project needed some good, budget conscious engineering, and maybe became messmerized when Xen through out the names like McGover (who worked for Ross) and Wilson.  He may have figured he was getting that quality of work together with a local presence and some technical skill.

Just guessing.

[John Kavanaugh]

I've played the course in question and must ask why not?  I thought it fit the land and culture of the community very well. 

[RJ_Daley]

In my early years of interest in GCA, I of course bought the most well known current book of its time, by Cornish and Whitten and read the biography section as if it were a novel, in order to get an idea of the various GCA's lives and backgrounds.  So, obviously one would stop at Xenophon Hassenphug and couldn't possibly then put his name out of mind.  It was just after Eugene Hassenfuss was a local mysterious celebrity from the Iran-Contra hearings and so the similarity of the names helped the name have even more staying power in one's mind.  I can definitely say I was aware of Xenophon Hassenplug long before I ever heard of some guy named Tom Doak.  Had I leved in the Penn Ohio area, I probably would have sought one of Xen's courses out to see what sort of archie he was.  I suppose I was thinking he might be an Amish archie and the course would be mowed with mule drawn gang reel mowers. 

[Peter Pallotta]

Interesting thread.  I'd imagine that most owners actually DON'T know what they want.  The architect who Chris C hired was fortunate - in Chris he had that rare owner who DID know what he wanted.   I think the reality in most other cases is that the architect needs to have enough of a portofolio and confidence to TELL the owner want he wants -- while managing to make it look as if it was OWNER'S idea all along.   (I'd also imagine that some owners, while they'd never admit it, are quite INTIMIDATED by the process and by the architect, especially one who is flying in from out of state and has ideas outside of the owner's comfort zone.)

Peter 

[Ronald Montesano]

John Ka,

Fit the land and culture very well...can you elaborate?  Did you play the Lake course, too?

[John Kavanaugh]

John Ka,

Fit the land and culture very well...can you elaborate?  Did you play the Lake course, too?

Here is a link to the Chautauqua Institute. http://www.ciweb.org/recreation/ To me it screams hire Xenophon Hassenplug.

How I ended up there would also explain why the owners might hire an affordable guy.  I'm on a cross country trip where this leg consisted of waking at Niagara Falls and sleeping in Cleveland.  I found this location through a search for Ross courses in New York.  It was a contingent location depending on the situation of the day and for reasons I do not remember came into play.  Well, we show up unannounced and the Ross course is booked so we pay and play the second course without care to the architect.  Ross and the institute is enough of a draw.

We had a great time getting paired with a think tank guy.  I get the impression that the people who visit the institute golf to get their mind off of the complexities of the universe.  The simple architecture of the hill course does that perfectly.

No I did not play the lake course.  If I am ever caught half way between Cleveland and Buffalo I hope to visit again.

[Evan Fleisher]

Had the great pleasure of playing the Hill course at the Chautauqua Golf Club this past weekend and really enjoyed it.  The first 6 holes are rather pedestrian (not bad, just nothing all that special or memorable).  Then things all began to change starting at #7...the land began to heave and move and the holes seemed to flow rather effortlessly across the topography.  The natural use of land forms and "lay of the land" architecture of the holes fit the space very well.  The walk was peaceful and comfortable and other than a bit of a clunker at the par-3 15th (land used as a "transition") the back nine was a really solid mix of holes, angles and looks.

I'm so glad we did not bother playing the Lake course (supposedly Ross, but unclear how much still remains) as the holes we did see looked completely "meh".

So...if you are in the neighborhood, take my advice and check out Hassenplug instead of Ross...you'll be glad you did.