You can’t teach an old dog new tricks, but apparently you can teach an old dog old tricks. I’m not saying Denis Griffiths is old, but at Old Union in north Georgia’s Appalachian foothills near Blairsville the architect created a look that might have come straight out of the early 20th century. Or before. Old Union is brightened with…
“A good idea is a good idea, forever.”–David Brent The above quote, proclaimed by Ricky Gervais’s character in the original British series The Office, is clearly false. Especially in real estate, where timing is as important as location. For the developers of Echelon, a would-be prestige-level golf community north of Atlanta, what seemed like a good idea in the early-2000’s…
If I had just one round to play and it had to be in the greater Atlanta area, with no access to private clubs, I’d probably take it at Cobblestone. The land is a paradox — it’s scenic with a lot of shoreline along Lake Acworth, but everywhere away from the water is steep, wooded…
MetroWest Country Club opened in 1987 and for a dozen or so years it was considered one of Orlando’s better public golf courses. But a lot happened to golf and golf design in those years, especially around Central Florida, and today the course feels old fashioned and ordinary, a benign but banal throwback. The routing runs…
Osprey Cove is like the age-old love story. You’ve heard the one — boy gets hot girl, boy loses hot girl, boy saunters quietly off into middle age. As it applies to golf courses, it’s a tale we heard over and over again in the 1990’s and early 2000’s. Recap: hot new golf destination/club receives waves…
Some golf courses are finessed into the earth, simply revealed or even discovered, as it were. Such is the mantra of naturalism and minimalism. The Oconee at the Reynolds Lake Oconee development on the other hand, screams, “I want land!” and goes and takes what it wants. The corridors of this behemoth are forged from the property’s…
Brazell’s Creek, part of the Georgia State Parks Golf Course system, is really two separate venues. Located in a hinterland roughly between Macon and Savannah, the original nine holes (of unknown origin, at least to me) rotate peacefully through the oaks and pines near the campgrounds of the modest Gordonia-Alatamaha State Park. The second nine, opened in…
The Stonemont Course at Stone Mountain Golf Club outside of Atlanta is what you expect from stock, mid-century Robert Trent Jones: a straight-forward, thick-waisted course full of tree-lined doglegs, big elevated greens pinched in front by bunkers and, yes, some runway tees. There’s a welcome what-you-see-is-what-you-get simplicity to the course as many of the holes play…
I’d love to be able to give the Lakemont Course at Stone Mountain Golf Club a higher score — parts of the property, in Georgia Stone Mountain Park, are quite beautiful, including five of the first six holes along Stone Mountain Lake with views of the big granite rock’s famous Confederate carving. There’s also no housing, and Marriott’s involvement has…
The question of how to shape courses in mountains or heavily wooded properties is an interesting one. Beyond engineering issues like cuts and fills that all courses of this variety share, every architect since golf courses moved inland has had to make decisions about how to present unnatural sites, including what the shapes and depths…