Campanelli and Klein to restore Willie Park Jr layout at Shuttle Meadow
Golf course architect Nick Campanelli and golf writer and historian Brad Klein are to restore Willie Park Jr’s first full 18-hole golf design in the United States, at Shuttle Meadow Country Club in the Kensington, Connecticut.
Construction work, scheduled to begin in the fall of 2026 and to continue in several phases, will address bunkers, fairway lines, green expansion, cart paths, tree work and equity of challenge for players with different swing speeds. The routing will remain as it is and restoration work follows the installation of a new Toro irrigation system, which is currently underway.
Klein and Campanelli’s masterplan for the work at Shuttle Meadow (Credit: Nick Campanelli)
Shuttle Meadow was founded in 1898 and moved to its present site in 1916, where the course was designed by two-time Open champion Park, a Scotsman from the famed Musselburgh golfing family. Park was also an astute businessman who turned his golfing prowess into a diverse career that included golf instructional publishing, club design and golf course architecture.
Park’s extensive mark across the golf landscape of the UK and Northern Europe includes Sunningdale’s Old course and Huntercombe, both in the south of England. Following promotional golf tours to the US in 1895 and 1896, he spent seven years in North America from 1916, designing or redesigning some 70 courses, including Maidstone Club in New York, and the North course at Olympia Fields in the suburbs of Chicago.
Construction work at Shuttle Meadow was implemented by a foreman, Orrin Smith, who would go on to a distinguished career in golf design in his own right. The routing of the par-71 layout remains as Park laid it out in terms of hole corridors, with two minor exceptions in the 1960s or 1970s: the green at the par-four twelfth hole was shifted modestly to the right, and the green for the short, par-four second hole was moved back onto a natural platform 50 yards behind the original putting surface.
Much of the original bunkering has remained intact, as confirmed by an aerial photograph from 1934 that provided the restoration team with visual evidence of the course. Further documentation was performed by club historian and green chairman Jerry Day, who published his research in two volumes issued by the club in 2015: Dawning of a Dream and Silver Threads. Day passed away in March 2025, before the restoration work began, but it was partly on the basis of his recommendation that the design team was chosen to undertake that work.
An aerial photograph from 1934 has guided the design partnership’s restorative work (Credit: Brad Klein)
The design partnership of longtime Connecticut residents Klein and Campanelli, formed in 2024, brings together two experienced golf architecture enthusiasts with long ties to Shuttle Meadow. Mark Gombotz, green committee chair and past president of Shuttle Meadow, said: “Brad and Nick were selected from a competitive group of architects for their extensive experience with Willie Park Jr designs and their exceptional attention to the design elements critical to restoring both authenticity and member enjoyment.”
Klein, a former PGA Tour caddie, was architecture editor of Golfweek and Golf Channel and is author of many books, including the definitive biography Discovering Donald Ross. Of over 140 design restoration projects where he has consulted, the first, in 1994, was Shuttle Meadow. He has since played the course annually with Day.
Campanelli first played Shuttle Meadow as a high school varsity golfer. He career in golf course design began in 2010 with a winning design submission for Golf Digest magazine and he has been a partner with the New England-based landscape architecture firm of MDLA since 2020. His most recent independent project – a comprehensive renovation of Heritage Harbour Golf Club in Bradenton, Florida – was completed in January 2023.
Campanelli and Klein’s portfolio includes masterplan development for the Donald Ross-designed Tatnuck Country Club in Massachusetts. Beyond time together on site or presenting together to various boards and committees, Klein undertakes historical analysis and writing while Campanelli’s experience in technical design enables him to produce detailed plans, budgets and graphics.
Campanelli said: “The comprehensive but efficient approach to design we take allows for an informed decision-making process when it comes to determining the scale and timing of potential projects. Without this framework in place, decision making at clubs can get bogged down, and momentum for projects can fade quickly.”
Plaques marking the presence of a distinguished roll-call of visiting golfers – Ted Ray, Harry Vardon, Francis Ouimet, Chick Evans, Walter Hagen, Bobby Jones – were installed in 2017 to mark the 100-year anniversary of the course, adorning the clubhouse and grounds at Shuttle Meadow. One on the tee of the par-four fourteenth hole – with a rolling, twisting fairway and partial punchbowl green – features Jones’s comment to playing partner Evans: “The hole is one of the 18 most beautiful I have ever played”.
Bobby Jones described the fourteenth hole at Shuttle Meadow as one of the 18 most beautiful he had ever played (Credit: Brad Klein)
Shuttle Meadow serves a diverse clientele. To assess the course for equity of challenge, the design team devised a color-coded vector mapping scheme that showed hypothetical landing areas for representative driving distances from each tee: 275 yards from the back (black) tee, 250 from the blue, 225 from the white, 200 from the golf, 175 from the green and 150 from the most forward (red) tee. This helped the design team demonstrate how a proposed adjusted course – 150 yards longer from the back, 400 yards shorter from the front – would provide greater balance for member play.
The design process has been guided by historic authenticity – recovering as much of the original Park-designed playing character as feasible, while accommodating the demands of modern play. Most bunkers will be kept in place – to be rebuilt with modern drainage structure to ensure maintainability. Green expansion will be limited to recapturing hole locations evident on old historic photography. Tree management balances the character of a parkland site with the original openness of the site. And fairways will be widened to engage flanking bunkers for a more dynamic ground game. In some cases, mowing patterns are being shifted entirely to recapture strategic playing lines that had been lost when hole corridors were narrowed following installation of modern irrigation in the 1960s.
A visit to Huntercombe inspired an additional touch to the Shuttle Meadow restoration effort. Klein says: “We were blown away by the wild, seemingly random mounding, open pits, hollows and half-sandy areas scattered about. They were so much more interesting than conventional bunkers. So, we looked for them at Shuttle Meadow, found them and decided to restore them.”
A visit to Park Jr’s design Huntercombe (fourth hole, pictured) in the UK provided inspiration for work on landforms (Credit: Brad Klein)
It took some explaining for Campanelli and Klein to relay to the committees and members what they were trying to achieve with ‘Huntercombes’, as these land formations are now known at Shuttle Meadow. Photos from the original helped. As did historic imagery of Shuttle Meadow, which confirmed that mounding and hollows once existed right of the first green and left of the fourth green. Initial tree clearing helped to expose areas of irregular mounding and native grass alongside the green of the long par-three fifteenth hole to show they had been there in some form for decades. After that, it was a matter of identifying a few more areas where Huntercombes would fit in seamlessly, without over-loading the course – just enough to convey a classic sensibility. “Besides, they are a more interesting feature than a bunker and less than half the price per square foot to build,” said Klein.
Preliminary plans call for construction to start in Fall 2026, and phased in over two or three years. In the meantime, the club will begin to implement aspects of the restoration that can be done in-house. Director of agronomy Scott Hans, who worked at the course in 2010 and assumed his role in 2025, has undertaken a programme of topdressing, thatch removal, rough renovation and tree management to create firmer, faster ground conditions. He has worked with Campanelli and Klein to identify stretches of cart path that can be removed and areas of the course that can be converted from intensive cultivation to more naturalised ground.
The new Toro Infinity irrigation system has been designed by Paul Roche of Golf Water and installed by Golf Irrigation Services. It will enable greater efficiency of coverage and fairway expansion with more discrete head-by-head control of sprinklers than before. The loop system surrounding greens will also be able to accommodate future greens expansion without the need to move perimeter heads.
Modest membership clubs like Shuttle Meadow have to proceed very carefully in terms of what the local market will bear. Gombotz says: “Brad and Nick are accommodating to the club’s timeline and budgetary commitments. They have provided the club with a foundation for work to be performed over the coming years, and a reference for the future leaders of Shuttle Meadow.”
| ADd Image Credit here for home page | Brad Klein |