Golf Course Architecture - Issue 62: October 2020

51 100 feet – of elevation change and the coastline juts in and out. That’s good both for golf and housing – we have nine greens right on the water, and you can see the ocean from everywhere on site. If we had tried to maximise the amount of real estate on the site, we wouldn’t have allocated so much land – and the best land – to the golf course. But that’s how it is at a number of classic courses that have homes. No-one says that Pebble Beach or Cypress Point are spoiled by the housing, and I think those are really great cues to draw from.” So that’s our first lesson – don’t prioritise housing over golf to the extent that the real estate gets all the best land. Another site planning issue is central to this: the vexed question of the master plan. “Bill was on site before Ron, the masterplanner,” says Cowan-Dewar. “We said to him, ‘figure out what land you want for golf and what’s the best golf course we can build, and we’ll work around that’. We have always tried to make sure that we won’t cheapen the experience when the homes are built. If you take the same approach to land planning as you do to golf course design, then that won’t happen.” Coore emphasises a lot of the same points as his client. “Ben was very generous with us. He knew that it was an extraordinary site. I’ve said that it could be the most visually amazing site we have ever worked on, and that’s saying something,” he explains. “Ben said, ‘Go and lay out the best golf course you can first. Use the shoreline, use the cliff edges for golf’. The shoreline was pretty easy. It was not hard to see individual golf holes along the shore. The problem was dealing with the elevation change once you left the shore. “Once we had laid out a preliminary routing, we began some give and take as to where residential areas might be. We did some tweaking to address how to get infrastructure on some of the steep slopes – how would they get streets and the like in to some of their residential areas. Quite frankly, it was a pretty comfortable give and take. We think the routing is of utmost importance, especially on a site like that. You want to take advantage of these amazing visuals, but you also have to make the golf course playable and enjoyable. We did move some things around. At one time I had a short par five running atop a long ridge and Ben good-naturedly reminded if we could put it in the adjacent valley, the real estate on that ridge would probably pay for the entire resort!” “No-one says that Pebble Beach or Cypress Point are spoiled by the housing, and I think those are really great cues to draw from” Photo: Pebble Beach Company Pebble Beach is one example of how golf and housing can happily coexist