Mark Mungeam has been working at Farm Neck Golf Club in Oak Bluffs, Massachusetts, since 2005, but it would be between 2023 and 2025 where his most substantial work would take place.

Farm Neck is a semi-private club in a resort area (the island of Martha’s Vineyard, off Cape Cod), where there also exists a healthy membership.

The course reopened earlier this month following a two-phase renovation. Hal Phillips spoke with Mark about the details of this project, his design philosophy and his priorities as he prepares to begin his tenure as president of the American Society of Golf Course Architects.

Why did Farm Neck go for the whole-hog renovation now versus 15 years ago?

Fair question. Partly because a lot of what we’ve just completed I’d been pushing for years. But the golf economy wasn’t so great 15 years ago, you may recall. The club also underwent a subtle change in governance during that time. The general manager, Tim Sweet, has been there forever and he’s very capable. Really has his finger on the pulse of everything. Still, the members petitioned him several years back to start a greens committee, which would have some say in what happened on the golf course. And eventually this greens committee convinced Tim they should do a masterplan.

That’s interesting, because Farm Neck is probably the second club for a lot of members.

Yes. They’re used to having a greens committee, and their primary clubs have likely undergone some sort of masterplan process, if not outright renovation, during the last 20 years.

The Vineyard Club opened on the island in 2009. That’s a private club, but it’s already been renovated once since opening. Did that influence Farm Neck’s interest in updating the golf course?

I guess the short answer is ‘yes’, but the competitive pressures to renovate are pretty universal across North America markets these days.

The original nine at Farm Neck opened in 1976; the back opened in 1980. Did you ever feel like the two nines went together?

Well, no. That was a big part of my charge, to make them more similar and cohesive in character and style. When we first got started – we broke ground on the older front nine in fall 2023 – we created a naturalised area of sand and native vegetation to replace a bank of pitch pines that had separated the third and fifth fairways. It used to be an old sand pit, and we worked at getting that particular expanse just right. Once we did, we replicated it in several areas on the newer back nine – to create a shared style and presentation. We did the same thing with the formal bunkering, which all share the same consistent style today.

Mark Mungeam’s work at Farm Neck focused on bringing more cohesion between both nines and reestablishing the sand-and-scrub character (Photo: Patrick Koenig)

What was the style brief for this shared look? Sand and scrub are very much in vogue these days, and you've got a site at Farm Neck where you could have gone that route whole hog. But it appears you were more restrained.

Yes, and that was on purpose quite honestly, because of exactly what you just said: everybody else is doing that, seemingly everywhere. It’s what you see down the road at The Vineyard Club. I didn’t want to do what everybody else was doing. I wanted Farm Neck to have its own identity, and the club agreed.

This dovetailed with everyone’s desire to deforest the golf course, to create width and better, longer views. We agreed it was high time we bit the bullet, cut back the trees and replace those areas with vegetation and dunes features indigenous to the island. At the same time, we’ve added more fairway turf out there – nearly all of it in widening the playing corridors. Farm Neck has always been one of the most picturesque courses in the country, in part because it’s a unique hybrid design on sandy, coastal terrain. That aesthetic we wouldn’t dare touch. In fact, we’ve doubled down by strongly accenting each hole with sand and native grasses at the edges.

I really didn’t want to go willy nilly at scraping away vegetation and exposing too much sand. In my view, that would have been at odds with the natural landscape here, while also doing what so many other clubs are doing these days in terms of waste areas.

The fourth green at Farm Neck (Photo: Patrick Koenig)

What was the order of battle out there?

We did the front nine first, between late October 2023 into May 2024, and then we did the back nine on the same schedule, 2024 into 2025. So, the front nine was our learning curve as to what we were going to do and how we wanted we wanted the natural areas to look… I had proposed something like this more than 10 years ago, roughly when I did renovate all 18 putting surfaces. But there was hesitancy about removing all those trees. That same area between three and five: we took down basically the number trees we had originally planned to remove 10 years ago. We went back to the third tee, looked at it and said, ‘You know what? We’ve taken down 60 per cent of the trees. We should just get rid of them all and treat that whole area as one big gnarly, contoured waste area.’

And that was the look you used to cohere the two nines?

Yes, that and the vegetation. We created the same shared, sand-and-scrub features between the eleventh, twelfth and sixteenth holes, for example. Between seventeen’s green and eighteen tee, too. We also had several par fours on the back that all played as doglegs right. We used the naturalised areas to vary those holes: at twelve we created an alternate fairway element; today, at the short thirteenth, we dare better players to play across a sand-and-scrub expanse – and maybe go for the green.

When it comes to fairway acreage, did you increase or reduce the footprint?

We’ve added more fairway turf out there – nearly all of it in widening the corridors. I’m very proud of how we efficiently and sustainably we accomplished that. We reduced the number of formal bunkers from 91 to 60, for example, but anyone returning to Farm Neck will experience, see and perhaps play from more sand, not less. The formal bunkers that remain are those truly integral to strategy. They’re not just out there for aesthetics. By adding some forward tees, we didn’t need several fairways to extend all the way back. Basically, we stole that turf and moved it further out into the golf hole – where it created more width, more playing area.

Farm Neck’s thirteenth hole (Photo: Patrick Koenig)

I spoke to the club historian at Farm Neck who said that golf has been played on this site since 1897, and he believes the turf elements from that era have never been so prominent as they are today, post renovation. How did you manage that?

Well, folks like to talk about making things that are more sustainable, but working on an island requires more than talk. Bringing sod to Farm Neck requires cutting it somewhere, shipping it by truck to Wareham, off-loading it to another truck, then bringing that vehicle across on the ferry. That’s expensive and it uses a huge amount of energy. So, we very efficiently redeployed the turf we had. When we rebuilt the tees, we saved that bentgrass and used it to expand the fairways, too – maybe three acres’ worth.

We also reduced our sod imports by ‘flipping’ existing turf. This is a big property, some 425 acres in all. We would identify native grasses along the edges of the course, remove them with a sod cutter, roll them up where we could, put these bundles and rolls on carts, then move them to these new naturalized areas. We also saved and replanted every last bit of fescue and bluestem from areas disrupted by the renovation.

So, there’s a reason the vegetation at Farm Neck recalls the place from 1910: we found the same grasses and integrated them back into the modern golf holes. People ask me what native grasses we used to build these new natural areas. I don’t even know! Some of what we harvested and replanted, I wouldn’t even call it ‘grass’. There’s a lot of fescue and little blue stem – the rest we’d need a botanist to identify. But it’s native. We know that because we found it growing on site, so we know it will thrive here. Of late, the state of Massachusetts has also been very encouraging when it comes to restoring what it calls ‘sand-plain grassland habitat’. That is exactly what we’ve done here.

Is that redeployment process also called ‘chunking’?

No. Flipping is more about hand labour. Chunking is a more mechanical process where we’d take the excavator, dig out a bucket full of this grassy material, and then plop it down to form the edge of a bunker or a fescue area. That’s chunking and we didn’t do that at Farm Neck, for example, when rebuilding bunker faces. We wanted a cleaner look there.

I didn’t realise you could cut and roll up areas of native turf like any other sod.

Sometimes you can't roll them up because they break apart so easily, but sometimes you can. The important thing is, when you put these hunks of turf back down, you’re not looking for perfection. I mean, you don't want it to look perfect.

So, the hunting and flipping of these ancient native grasses, among other duties, was a combined effort among the construction crew and the superintendent’s crew?

Andrew Nisbet was the course super on this renovation and he did a wonderful job in all aspects. The contractor was Matt Staffieri, another young guy who runs MAS Golf Construction and Renovation out of Hopkinton, Massachusetts. It was a blast working with both Andrew and Matt on this job, collaborating on how things would look, especially in these native or naturalised areas.

I seem to recall, Mark, that when you prepped Olympia Fields for the US Open in 2003, you didn’t show up in Chicago to chat up the press. You actually went and worked the grounds crew all four days.

Well, that’s true and I remain very hands-on. But I tend not to ask for help and I’m not always the best delegator. However, I really enjoyed working alongside Matt, who broke into the business working on the TPC Boston in Norton and has worked a lot of Gil Hanse projects on the renovation side: The Country Club ahead the recent Open, Kittansett, Worcester…

In any case, sometimes you have to constrain a contractor, but it was great to work with Matt, who loves to be involved with the design work and likes play around a little bit with stuff. He made it easy to be creative, together.

Give me an example of what you mean from the Farm Neck renovation.

The seventeenth green. I don’t remember what year it was, but I was involved in building a pond to the left of that green 15 years ago or so. We took the dirt from the excavation and built mounding behind and right of the green. To my design eye today, it looked modern and artificial and stupid. So, you know, right from the get-go, my attitude was, we gotta get rid of these mounds.

So, Matt came up with some ideas, and I would counter with my own, and eventually we got rid of all the dirt that was behind the green and right of the approach. But we did build up the mounding back right of the green, behind the bunker – made it even higher, in fact, so it really stands out as a ‘peak’. And we naturalised all these features, especially as the tie-ins extend off toward the eighteenth tee. Today there’s a combination of mounds and drops, and it blends into fescue. That was a big change – a great change that carried our aesthetic through to another hole later in the 18-hole sequence. Teamwork is good.

Mark Mungeam, on site at Farm Neck, will be the 2025-26 ASGCA president (Photo: Patrick Koenig)

You take the gavel as president of the American Society of Golf Course Architects this October, just across Nantucket Sound, on Cape Cod. What are your priorities?

My biggest goal as president will be to improve and/or expand people’s view of public golf. I’ve done lots of private club work, but public and municipal golf is what I’m most involved in and let’s be honest and clear: of the 15,000 golf courses in the US, 11,000 are public. An even higher percentage of golf rounds are played on these courses. And yet all we talk and read about, it seems, are private clubs that are being renovated and restored, again. So, I want to enhance the visibility and viability and of public golf and public golf architecture.

In being so many things to so many people, public golf architecture is arguably more complicated and demanding than other categories, no? I’m thinking of your restoration of two Donald Ross-designed, Greater Boston munis, George Wright and Franklin Park, prior to their hosting the Massachusetts Amateur in 2018. They will host again in 2028. In between they host 80,000 rounds a year!

Well, that’s just it. There is so much variation in public golf. You got public resort courses like Farm Neck, municipals, privately owned daily-fees and dozens of shades of grey in between. There can be a dumbing down of design in this sector but, at the same time, there is more opportunity to create interesting, fun golf that, by necessity, is more efficient and less costly to maintain. Speed of play is obviously way more important for public golf. And it’s a fine line to address that while not dumbing things down with generics. But professionally, that’s why architects are drawn to what we do: it’s hard! But also, super satisfying.

Hal Phillips is a journalist, agency owner and former editor-in-chief of Golf Course News. He also writes about soccer and his second book, Sibling Rivalry, will be published by Bloomsbury in 2026.