Golf Course Architecture - Issue 61, July 2020

77 EYEBROW – NAME OF COURSE Singapore has a typically tropical climate, with abundant rain during the wet season, so self-sufficiency in water is not an impossible goal – but for the course to survive the dry season, which generally runs from March to August, the course obviously needs to be able to detain a large amount of water. To deal with these issues, the club clearly needed some heavy-duty architectural assistance, so it called on David Dale and Kevin Ramsey of the globetrotting Golfplan practice. Ramsey and Dale have reinvented the course, giving it a new design, new grass, and, crucially, a whole new infrastructure. The numbers are impressive. Before the rebuild, Seletar could detain just over 60,000 cubic metres of water; now that figure is 132,000. The area of maintained turf has gone down from 54.9 to 36.5 hectares. Turf has been replaced with bahiagrass and other non-irrigated landscape elements. The total area of bunkers is down by 43 per cent, and the course has been sandcapped to improve drainage. “This is the model for clubs moving forward, to keep quality high, be much more environmentally responsible and sustainable, and be more efficient with maintenance costs,” says Dale. The Seletar property, which has around 20 metres of elevation change, is really rather nice; it rolls in a fashion that is just about ideal for golf; never too steep but equally in no sense flat. Standout holes include the excellent short par-four fifth and the par-five seventh, which has water all the way up the right, and a rather spectacular waterfall feature behind the green. Long hitters can think about trying to get home in two, but the shot will be extremely demanding, as the green is offset to the right side, and thus the direct route involves a massive water carry. Another new hole, the par-five fourth, also features an offset green, although this time to the left side. Golfplan’s Kevin Ramsey and David Dale devised a new routing for Seletar that addressed the “domino effect” of land on the reservoir’s edge being reclaimed by the Singapore government for a public pathway A waterfall provides a backdrop to the green of the par-five seventh Image: Golfplan