Farm Neck Golf Club in Oak Bluffs, Massachusetts, has reopened its golf course following the completion of an 18-hole renovation by Mark Mungeam.
The semi-private club – located on Martha’s Vineyard – originally opened in 1976 with a nine-hole layout by Geoffrey Cornish and Bill Robinson. A second nine was added in 1980 by Patrick Mulligan. Cornish and Brian Silva were the club’s consulting architects until the early 2000s when Mungeam was appointed. Since then, the club has undertaken various small projects, although it rebuilt all greens to USGA specifications between 2011 and 2014.
For the 18-hole renovation, Mungeam worked with contractor MAS Golf Construction, course superintendent Andrew Nisbet, assistant super Rayn Carey and club staff. The front nine was rebuilt between autumn 2023 and spring 2024, and then the back nine from October 2024 to May 2025.
The eighth hole, which was part of the first phase of renovation work in autumn 2023-spring 2024 (Photo: Patrick Koenig)
“It’s no secret that the two nines at Farm Neck were rather dissimilar, as they were built by different architects, five years apart,” said Mungeam. “We agreed it was high time we bit the bullet, cut back the forest obscuring the ocean views, and replaced it 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 accenting each hole with sand and native grasses at the edges.”
The project has seen hundreds of pine trees replaced with native vegetation (Photo: Patrick Koenig)
The course used to have 91 bunkers, but that total has been reduced by a third, with Mungeam, instead, incorporating more sand and scrub areas.
At the third and fifth holes, dozens of pine trees have been replaced by 120 yards of contoured, informal bunkering and native vegetation. “The native area between three and five is the look we used to pull the two nines together stylistically,” said Mungeam. “We created the same shared, sand-and-scrub features between the eleventh, twelfth and sixteenth holes, for example. Between seventeen’s green and the eighteenth tee, too.”
Tees on every hole have been renovated – fourth hole, pictured (Patrick Koenig)
The project has included the removal of hundreds of miniature ‘cape’ pines with native areas now maximising playing width and vistas.
“Folks like to talk about making things that are more sustainable, but working on an island requires more than talk,” said Mungeam. “Bringing sod to Farm Neck requires cutting it somewhere, shipping it by truck to Wareham, offloading it to another truck, then bringing that vehicle across on the ferry. That’s expensive and it uses a huge amount of energy.
“At Farm Neck, we significantly 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 it with a sod cutter, roll it up where we could, put it on carts and move it to these new naturalised areas. We also saved and re-deployed every last bit of fescue and bluestem from areas disrupted by the renovation. When we rebuilt the tees, we saved that bentgrass and used it to expand the fairways – maybe 10 acres’ worth.”
Looking from the green to tee on the par-three fifteenth (Photo: Patrick Koenig)
“People ask me what native grasses we used to build these new areas,” said Mungeam. “I don’t even know! There’s a lot of fescue and little blue stem – the rest we’d need a botanist to identify. But it’s native. 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.”
See more of Patrick Koenig’s Farm Neck images on our Instagram page.