on May 10, 2016
(March 2016) By: Tom Cunneff
Gil Hanse is sitting inside a bulldozer at Los Angeles Country Club where’s he’s been shaping new greens and bunkers this winter as part of a complete redesign of the South Course. Most architects as busy as he is usually don’t have time to work a dozer blade, but not Hanse. He really loves moving dirt around.
“You may have heard me say this before,” he says, “but if I get too busy to do this part of the job, then we’ve lost the battle.”
With his slate of thought-provoking, lay-of-the land designs, Hanse is waging war on strategically bereft and artificial-looking layouts. In addition to acclaimed designs like Castle Stuart, Craighead Links, and Boston Golf Club, he has nine courses and/or restorations in various stages of development, including the Olympic course in Rio, which is all but complete except for some fine-tuning. It will have its official opening on March 8th when nine local golfers play a test event.
“The turf is in immaculate condition,” he says. “Now we’re just working on bunker edging and native grass lines.” And perhaps doing some mosquito control at the problem-riddled course after the outbreak of the Zika virus in Brazil. “Fortunately, the water in our lakes is constantly moving, but it’s like, now we’ve got plague! What’s next?”
Mossy Oak Golf Club in West Point, Miss., will open right after the Olympics in September. The daily-fee club is a collaboration between George Bryan, who developed Old Waverly Golf Club across the street, and Toxey Haas, the founder of the hunting camouflage company from which the club gets its name. Set on 175 acres in a wide-open, rolling meadow, the course is reminiscent of Shinnecock with a lot of native grasses between holes.
“From the sixth green you can see every green on the course when the leaves are down,” says Hanse. “When [Haas] came on board, we talked a lot about Dr. MacKenzie being a camouflage expert in the Boer War. We were excited to tell them, ‘Hey, this is not the first partnership between camouflage experts and golf course developers.’”
Opening in December, Trump Dubai is Hanse’s first pure real estate development design, but most of the holes have wide playing corridors and the look is much more rugged with plenty of native grasses than the manicured designs that dominate there.
Perhaps the most eagerly anticipated course in his current projects’ folder is the Black Course at Streamsong in Florida. Six holes are grassed and he’ll have four more done by the first week of March. With a completion date of June 1, the course will open for play in October 2017. Two characteristics that will distinguish it from the other two minimalist courses at the resort by Tom Doak and Coore/Crenshaw are its Royal Melbourne-like bunkering similar to Rio and the scale of the course. It’s on a much bigger piece of property than the Red and the Blue so the holes and features are larger, too.
“If our scale and bunkers are different, hopefully it’ll be similar to what they were able to accomplish in playability and interest,” says Hanse, who started his career working for Doak. “We’re really excited about what we’re building there.”
After he and his partner, Jim Wagner, finish up at Streamsong and LACC South, where they’re creating a completely new course to entice more member play and save on water usage, they’ll start work on another private course this fall in Cobbtown, Ga., about an hour west of Savannah.
“It’s a gorgeous site, wonderful topography, all sand with live oaks,” says Hanse. “It’s one of the nicer pieces of property we’ve ever seen, particularly in the Southeast. It’s located along the Ohoopee River, which has a run of dunes that’s like 30 miles long.”
They’ll also begin a major restoration this fall to all the greens, bunkers, and tees on Winged Foot’s West Course, which will host the 2020 U.S. Open, since the members loved what they did to the East Course.
And sometime next year if all goes according to plan, Hanse will break ground on Bandon Dunes’ fifth course, Bandon Links, six miles south of the resort. He and Wagner walked the routing with Keiser two weeks ago.
“Mike is convinced that we can do something special that he’d be proud to have as part of the resort,” says Hanse. “It’s not right on the ocean, but we’ve got some beautiful ocean views. It’s got some significant dunes and it’ll have a lot of exposed sand similar in topography to the opening and closing holes on Bandon Trails.”