Andrew Green: Built to design

Throughout the hundred-plus years that golf course design has existed as a career, most new entrants to the business have started out by working for an established golf designer, as some kind of assistant.

Hugh Alison became Harry Colt’s associate and left his mark across Europe, America and Japan; Bobby and Rees Jones started out helping their father, Robert Trent Jones Sr, before going on to build hundreds of courses of their own. And, more recently, with the emergence of the ‘design and shape’ construction model, working for a big name as a shaper-associate has become a practical option for young people who want to be golf architects.

Andrew Green’s journey was a little different, though his youthful ambition echoes that of so many other golf architects. “When I was a junior in high school, I wanted to become a golf course architect,” he says. “Everyone I discussed this with said it would be near impossible to make a name for myself. I wasn’t the best golfer, and I didn’t have a family connection to the design business.

“I decided that I would work harder than everyone else and prove to the world that I could do it. I went to Virginia Tech and studied both landscape architecture and turfgrass management. This meant two full degrees in five years, never taking fewer than 18 credits a semester. The knowledge and support I received from those two programmes gave me the foundation I use every day. I did not have the greatest sense of golf architecture at the time, but I had a deep desire to learn everything about how golf courses worked and why different golf courses were adored.”

Once out of school, Green went to work for McDonald & Sons, which was primarily a golf course renovation and construction company. “I started on the construction side of the business but was able to design small projects along the way,” he says. “I soaked in the opportunity to work around some very talented people and on some significant projects. Over time, my role grew into full masterplan designs. The stress and learning curve when you design something, communicate that vision to a client, then have to build it with zero outside help made me a better architect.”

Green says that this unconventional route was one of the best things that could have happened to him. “I learned how ideas on paper actually translate into dirt. I learned equipment, drainage, grading, grassing, sequencing, budgets and, probably most importantly, how decisions made by an architect affect the people who have to build and maintain the golf course.

“There was certainly a trade-off. I wasn’t working under my own name, so the public credit for the work wasn’t necessarily mine. But I was given opportunities at a relatively young age that I probably would not have received in a traditional architecture office. I wouldn’t trade that experience. It gave me a base that still influences almost every decision I make today.”

While with McDonald & Sons, Green had the chance to work on a lot of different projects, ranging from pure construction, through renovation, to full newbuilds. “Working in construction exposed me to a few architects with different philosophies and very different ways of getting their ideas onto the ground,” he says. “I was able to see what translated successfully from a drawing into the field and what didn’t. I also learned how much of golf course architecture ultimately happens during construction. I was kind of stunned by the level of detail that was missing from the process. A plan can establish the idea, but the details that make a golf course interesting – the contours, transitions, bunker edges, drainage, tie-ins and small movements in the ground – need to be understood and resolved in the field, and you better be paying attention! I also learned the business from the contractor’s side. Understanding costs, schedules, manpower and production has been incredibly valuable as an architect. It taught me that creativity and practicality don’t have to work against one another. It is also why my projects need a reliable schedule, budget and sequence, and we work at being accountable to each.

“King Carter Golf Club in Virginia was the second course I helped design and build from the ground up. I was supposed to be the on-site architect but went from doing layout and painting bunkers less than six months out of college to running the entire job as the project manager. Being responsible for every single piece of that project, including the first few months of grow-in, makes you learn fast and understand how each decision builds on the next and last.

“Historic research started to be a huge part of my process at Sunnybrook, Bidermann and Whitemarsh Valley in the greater Philadelphia area. These three projects really allowed me to study how three wildly different architects (William and David Gordon, Dick Wilson and George Thomas) each designed their course, how they thought about the land and each shot, then how the memberships either embraced, adjusted or just let the properties evolve. Connecting the original intent to the current status of each, then communicating to a group of leaders about what was missing, what their course could be, and then executing each restoration effort was huge in developing my process and the appreciation/communication details that are key to success.”

King Carter in Virginia, one of the first courses Green helped design while at McDonald & Sons (Photo: King Carter Golf)

In 2014, after 14 years with McDonald & Sons, Green took the momentous decision to leave the mother ship and set up as an independent architect. Although the industry was not in a particularly good place then, in retrospect it was probably an opportune moment, as golf recovered slowly from the recession. “I don’t know that there was ever a moment when I felt completely certain it was the right time,” he says. “At some point, I simply realised that if I wanted to find out what I could do on my own, I needed to take the chance. I looked around and saw an ageing group of lead architects in the industry, and the economic downturn of 2008 had washed most folks my age out of the business. I knew a lot of golf courses (built or renovated between 1980 and 2008) would need work in the next 10 to 20 years… and said, ‘Hey, why not me?’ Starting my own firm was not really about leaving something behind. It was about finding out where I could take those ideas if I was completely responsible for the result. There was certainly risk involved, but I felt I had enough experience at that point to bet on myself. My company is formally named Green Golf & Turf – because I wasn’t sure if I’d need the diversity to do landscaping work!”

Green achieved widespread acclaim for his restoration of the Donald Ross layout at Inverness Club (Photo: Inverness Club)

A few years after starting his business, Green received the commission that would change his life, at Inverness Club in Ohio, designed in 1916 by Donald Ross. Inverness is one of the most storied championship venues in America; it has hosted four US Opens, an Amateur and two PGAs. But Paul Azinger’s PGA Championship win in 1993 was the course’s last Major, until Green got his hands on it, replacing three holes designed in 1979 by Tom and George Fazio, removing trees to restore corridors to something nearer their original width, and recapturing green space.

“Inverness changed the trajectory of my career,” says Green. “I had received the commission at Oak Hill prior, but Inverness happened first. The interview process was pretty detailed. I came in and walked the property with the chairman and superintendent. I was super nervous but was blown away by the potential. I stood at the chain-link fence right of what was the third hole, looking into a cornfield and saw the opportunity to use this ground in some special ways. My formal presentation to the committee included the new holes I saw that day. It connected the original golf course by building two new par threes (inspired by Ross’s eighth and thirteenth) and a new par four (Ross’s seventh). It was crazy how we could take the design principles of Ross’s lost holes and apply them to this space. Today, I think many golfers can’t tell which ones are new and that’s a huge success for me.

“What made the project even more special was the opportunity to really study the history of the golf course and understand what Donald Ross had intended, rather than simply trying to make an old golf course look old again. There was tremendous information available through photographs, plans and the physical evidence that remained on the property. Their archive is the most thorough I’ve come across. The work became an exercise in discovery. We were trying to understand what had been lost and determine what deserved to come back, while also recognising that the golf course needed to function in the modern game. So much had changed on the property and with the game. A lot of the work was done very deliberately in the field. That’s where my construction background became incredibly valuable. I was comfortable making decisions in the dirt and adjusting things as we uncovered more information.

“When the project was finished, I think people responded to the fact that Inverness once again had a very distinct personality. It didn’t look like a generic restoration. It didn’t have modern warts stuck on it. It looked like Inverness.”

Inverness is now firmly back on the championship calendar. The new (old)-look course will make its Major bow next summer, hosting the US Women’s Open, and will play host to a number of USGA events over the next two decades, culminating in the return of the US Open in 2045. Since Inverness received so much acclaim, Green has become something of a go-to architect for classic clubs, particularly those that used to be regular tournament venues, but which have, for whatever reason, fallen out of favour.

“The thread that runs through all my work is trying to understand what makes each property unique before deciding what to do to it,” says Green. “I don’t want Inverness to look like Oak Hill, or Scioto to look like Inverness, simply because Donald Ross designed all three. The architecture should come from the golf course, the land, its history and the particular circumstances under which it was created. At the same time, restoration isn’t archaeology for its own sake. These are living golf courses. They have members, maintenance requirements, budgets and expectations that are very different from those of 100 years ago. So, the challenge is to understand the original architecture deeply enough that you can move it forward without losing its identity. I think the best work respects the past without becoming trapped by it. Critics may have particular issues with the word restoration… but for me there is not a single design decision I make on a historic property for which I cannot point to a moment in time or data point in that club’s history. The game evolves and properties age, but we want the special cathedrals of the game to be protected, embraced with the story of how they came to be, and still relevant today.”

This reference to restoration highlights a complicated question: where does restoration end, and renovation, or even redesign, begin? Golfers, especially the best golfers, now hit the ball massively further than those of the Golden Age. Is it restorative to recreate a 100-year-old drive hazard that a top player can now blow past with a five-iron? Modern greenkeeping means that surfaces run many times faster than in the 1920s: is it restoration to rebuild a green which sloped at five per cent at one-and-a-half? And there is rarely, if ever, space on a property to rebuild holes in such a way that they present the same challenges to Rory McIlroy as they did to Walter Hagen.

“I don’t think there is a clean line,” says Green. “Pure restoration suggests returning something to a specific moment in time. That is rarely completely possible, or even desirable, on a golf course. Trees have grown, drainage patterns have changed, equipment has changed, golfers have changed, and expectations for conditioning and playability have changed. For me, history is evidence rather than a set of handcuffs. We study photographs, plans, aerials and whatever physical evidence remains, and that gives us a vocabulary for understanding the architect and the golf course. From there, we have to make decisions about what makes sense today.

“We want to be highly respectful of a club’s history and original architecture. But when you get into the details, we generally want the benefits of both restoration and renovation. We want their history back, but we also want better drainage, more tee options, improved maintenance, strategic relevance and a golf course that works for today’s membership. The trick is making those modern interventions feel as though they belong.”

The restoration movement in the US really gained traction with work on Donald Ross courses, and Green too has had his greatest successes working on courses designed originally by Ross. Early Ross restorations were perhaps a little one-size-fits-all, with architects recreating ‘Ross bunkers’ and ‘Ross greens’ according to some kind of template, without reference to the variety in the architect’s oeuvre, and his responses to individual sites. Today, though, restoration architects have moved beyond those early templates. “There was a period when restoration sometimes became an exercise in recreating what people believed a Ross bunker or Ross green was supposed to look like,” he says. “But the more Ross courses you study, the more obvious it becomes that there isn’t one universal vocabulary.

“Ross worked for decades, on very different sites, with different budgets, different construction crews and different levels of personal involvement. His ideas evolved. The people implementing those ideas mattered as well. So, I try to start each project without assuming I already know the answer simply because I’ve worked on other Ross courses. We collect historic photographs, plans, aerials and written material, but we also study the ground itself. Often the most useful evidence is still sitting there beneath years of change.

“Then you begin comparing sources. What did Ross do at this particular course? What period was it? What was the original topography like? Which features appear repeatedly in photographs? Which things may have been interpretations by someone else? The objective isn’t to create my version of Donald Ross. It is to rediscover the particular version of Ross that existed at that particular place. I often say, ‘We don’t want to be a cover band or play the greatest hits; we want to be supremely unique and intentional in our respect for the original design’.”

Green also places practical considerations at the forefront of his design work. “A golf course can be architecturally interesting, but if it cannot recover from a significant rainfall or be maintained efficiently, eventually those problems begin to compromise the architecture itself.

“My turfgrass and construction background probably makes me think about this more than some architects. I’m constantly thinking about where water goes, how it gets there, what happens after a major storm, how equipment moves around the property and how quickly the maintenance staff can get the golf course back into playable condition. Sometimes I do better at this than other times. Drainage is an aspect of golf course design and construction that should always be improved upon. No matter your club budget, annual funds should be allocated to make your course drain better. Good drainage makes the turf better, maintenance more efficient, and golf more enjoyable.

“Major championships magnify all those issues because the expectations and consequences are greater, but the same principles matter to a member on Saturday morning. Good architecture and good infrastructure should support one another. I don’t see drainage, agronomy and recoverability as separate from design. They are part of making the architecture work. I am blessed to have seen this in every aspect and put it fully into who I am as an architect.”

Firefly, just south of Nashville, is Green’s first original design. The course opened in September 2026 (Photo: Austin Peckham/Firefly)

Green’s success in restoration has quickly made him one of the most dynamic names in the industry, and it is therefore unsurprising that developers of new courses want to get a piece of the action. Firefly in Tennessee, his first newbuild under his own name, opened to its members earlier this year, and Kawonu in South Carolina, being developed by Scott Ferrell, who used to run Gary Player Design, will do so next year. But Green says he never forgets the lessons he learned working on historic courses, even when presented with a blank slate. “Working on historic courses teaches you humility,” he says. “You spend a lot of time studying decisions made 80 or 100 years ago and asking why they still work. Very often the answer isn’t complexity. It is restraint, interesting ground, good angles, width, variety and features that feel inseparable from the landscape. It has also taught me that golf courses don’t need to explain themselves immediately. Some of the best architecture reveals itself over time. You discover different ways to play a hole depending on the wind, your ability, where the hole is cut or simply how aggressive you feel that day. That’s what I want to carry into new work. I want to apply the lessons that made those courses endure.

“And perhaps the biggest lesson is that the land should have a voice. With a new course, there is an enormous temptation to show everyone what you can create. Studying the best old courses has taught me that knowing what not to do can be just as important. The goal is to create something that feels inevitable… as though the golf course belongs there rather than having been placed there. I am so proud of the new projects we have, because they are well connected to the ground, they flow well from hole to hole, they ask interesting golf questions and do it without crazy ‘window treatments’. I don’t need to flash my ego. Our courses have soul and for me that is what is most important.”

This article first appeared in the October 2026 issue of Golf Course Architecture. For a printed subscription or free digital edition, please visit our subscriptions page.