on January 15, 2024
January 10, 2024 By: Derek Duncan — When building Ladera, their new course in the southern end of the Coachella Valley, Los Angeles-based entertainment executive Irving Azoff and Eddy Cue, Apple’s senior vice president of services, kept instructions to Gil Hanse and Jim Wagner simple: no water features, no palm trees. Otherwise, the architects had creative freedom to reinvent 300 acres of lemon groves and mango orchards as a broken landscape of swashbuckling golf holes and dry arroyos.
Removing ponds and palms from the golf vernacular of Palm Springs—a land of walled-off Edens and enclaves of ornately manicured courses—was already a radical idea. Hanse and Wagner stepped outside the desert paradigm by manufacturing a kind of pre-modern Southern California agrarian landscape. The Ladera site slopes 140 feet from the high point near the Santa Rosa Mountains toward a low end that Hanse and Wagner propped up to reorient sightlines over the valley toward the eastern Mecca Hills. Through the center they carved a network of arroyos and sandy riverbeds that emulate the pathways of rushing water. The golf holes flow around, over and through the sunken ravines, the first nine looping clockwise around the counterclockwise second nine a la Muirfield.
The arroyos are integral to the effectiveness of Ladera—stunning visual accompaniments to the spirited golf shots rendered with eroded edges and contrasting compositions of grasses, brush, sycamores, sand and native stone that often fall in pattern with the mountain backdrops. They are also hazards brimming with danger and enticement.
“We tried to focus on setting up good diagonals off of tees,” Hanse says. “We were thinking about Sand Hills and some of those beautiful diagonals that Bill [Coore] and Ben [Crenshaw] created, and we had an opportunity to build those big diagonals for good players to take on while providing the width for average golfers.”
The fairways are enormous—60 to 100 yards wide—but they bend and slink around bunkers and the arroyos, requiring an element of edging and corner-cutting for the best approach positions. The greens are a kaleidoscope of shape and movement, from the broad saucer of the 535-yard par-4 fourth to the stepped and fractured 14th to the 285-yard par-3 12th that inverts the typical Biarritz recipe by playfully placing the deep swale at the back of the putting surface rather than the middle or front.
The green at the 545-yard par-5 10th, nestled in the ravine and obscured by a dune, is 40 yards deep and just 11 paces across, and missing it with long second shots leaves near impossible up-and-downs. The drivable par-4 15th presents a fairway 125 yards across, but the sliver of green with cropped, fallaway surrounds (think of the 10th at Riviera, only bunkerless and perched 10 feet higher) can be inaccessible from wide angles.
Ladera is by far the most land Hanse and Wagner have previously moved, but it looks like they have been doing it for their entire careers.
“Some people will realize it was created, but we want others to believe that the land could have naturally occurred as it is,” Hanse says. “If anyone is going to be well-suited to build a maximalist landscape where you’re creating everything, it would be a minimalist who is wired to pay attention to those small details and to what real landforms look like.”
Ultimate credit for turning lemons into Ladera goes to Azoff and Cue, Hanse says.
“Irving, and to some degree Eddy, is so comfortable being around artists that he understands that every creative person has a different process. He innately knows that process allows artists to do their best work, so he let us be as creative as we wanted and provided all the resources and support that enabled us to do our best work. Those two were uniquely qualified to allow us to build a golf course like Ladera.”