Inside Kevin Norby’s restoration of A.W. Tillinghast’s Golden Valley TFC contributor Bradley S. Klein provides a unique perspective on the club’s two-year process to reclaim the Golden Era architect’s original intent.
GOLDEN VALLEY, Minnesota — For the past two years, golf course architect Kevin Norby has been restoring Golden Valley Country Club, an A.W. Tillinghast gem from 1926 in the Twin Cities area.With the work now done and the course healing up for reopening in 2024, I thought it appropriate to explain what an insider like myself saw and learned along the way about the process. My vantage point was as paid consultant to the designer — a secondary role to be sure, but one that gave me privileged access as well as occasional license to voice my concerns.
Golden Valley, a private membership club only 5 miles west of downtown Minneapolis, Minnesota, struck me immediately by virtue of its routings. The par-73 layout includes six par 5s, five par 3s and only seven par 4s. The property is trisected by a road and by an active railroad track that is played over on the tee shot for the par-5 sixth hole. Those who warm to the classic sounds of a train whistle will feel very comfortable here. The greens are steeply sloped, the greenside bunkers very deep and the grounds are blessed with over two dozen stately elm trees that have managed to survive the blight that otherwise devastated much of American parkland golf in the 1960s and 1970s.
Norby, a longtime member of the American Society of Golf Course Architects, is a locally based designer with a long resume of both new courses and renovations across the country — many of them in the upper Midwest. His work at Golden Valley with superintendent David Phillips and the construction team from Duininck Golf was meticulous in ensuring the authenticity of the Tillinghast heritage.
The club’s collection of vintage course photography proved indispensable. So, too, did the advice of Tillinghast biographer and architecture archivist Philip Young, who spent some time on site as well as undertaking background research. At one point we addressed a members’ meeting and helped allay concerns they had by assuring them this project was all being done in the spirit of a Tillinghast restoration.
Klein's role — in the form of seven site visits, follow-up reports and lots of conversation via email and phone — was to provide a second set of eyes to the project, affirming some decisions Norby made, encouraging him to be bolder when he might otherwise have wavered, and assuring the club not to compromise or in any way hold back when they had this one — and only — chance to get things right. That was especially true when it came to tree removal, bunker slopes and cross bunkers.
Read more:
https://www.firstcallgolf.com/features/feature/2023-11-19/inside-kevin-norbys-restoration-of-a-w-tillinghasts-golden-valley