Getting established in golf course design is a hit-and-miss business, but the one thing that can generally be said is that it takes a long time. The small size of the industry means that, despite numerous attempts to create pathways for new designers, getting one’s start is unpredictable and depends largely on meeting the right people at the right time.
Few golf architects have ever met the right person at the right time in the way that David McLay Kidd did. It’s true that, as the son of the long-time manager of the golf courses at Gleneagles, Scotland’s greatest golf resort, he was closer to the industry than most would-be architects, but that kind of thing only goes so far.
Kidd was working for Gleneagles Golf Developments, a business set up under the aegis of the resort to help design and build new courses, when the call that would change his life came in. Mike Keiser had sold his greetings card company and got an appetite for developing golf courses by creating the Dunes Club on the shore of Lake Michigan, not far from his Chicago base. He found and, against all the advice he received, bought a huge tract of sandy ground on the coast of southern Oregon, near the small town of Bandon. And he was looking for the right designer to bring his vision to life.
“The key link was through Rick Somers, who is a very close friend of Mike’s and runs Great Golf Resorts of the World,” says Kidd. “Mike was talking to Rick about his land in Oregon, and Rick said, ‘If you want to build a links course, perhaps you should hire a Scottish architect’. Mike replied, ‘I would, but there aren’t any’. Rick happened to be involved with Gleneagles Golf, and knew my dad, and that’s how the connection was made.”
Kidd’s breakthrough design at Bandon Dunes opened in 1999. The remote Oregon resort has since built four more full eighteens, and two par-three courses, Credit: Nathan Kahler courtesy of Bandon Dunes Golf Resort
David and his father Jimmy visited Bandon fairly quickly. “I thought it sounded like an interesting opportunity, so I went out for a week with my dad,” says Kidd. “I had already seen some plans, and my boss at Gleneagles, Ian Ferrier, had been out there before me, so I had a pretty good idea of what the site was like and where it was. I drew a plan for 36 holes where Bandon is and where Trails now is. I think I was the first to make clear to Mike what a true links was – old-style fescue grasses, rumpled fairways, walking, not putting the clubhouse right by the water. I think that was what helped Mike to see what he had there. He had been a founding member of Sand Hills, and obviously that place had broken the mould, but it had golf carts and bentgrass greens – things that weren’t true to the original British model.”
It took a long time – over three years – before Keiser finally handed the keys to Bandon over to the young architect, and during all that time, Kidd was never totally certain that he had the gig.
“We started construction in August 1997, and that was the first point I knew for sure I was doing it,” he says. “I was 29 years old. No-one, including Mike, had any idea that the golfing public in America would gravitate to our idea as much as they did. Mike was building something that he liked, and hoped that enough people would see it and share his views.” As the intervening years have proved in spades, they did!
“It didn’t have a name, there was no real business plan,” Kidd goes on. “Dick Youngscap, the founder of Sand Hills, came out before we started building it. I met him in 1996, and I felt I was being interviewed again. It seemed that I had to convince Dick that I knew what I was doing, which I didn’t, but I talked a good talk. There was no contractor. I was the guy on site, all day every day, building the golf course. Jim Haley was the only other person on site who had ever built a golf course before – the rest were locals, fishermen and farmers. I was taking them all to the bar regularly, and I created a sense of common objective – a brotherhood. I told them that we were building something that would put the area on the map. Some of them are still there!”
Kidd on an early site visit with general manager Josh Lesnik and developer Mike Keiser
After Bandon, Kidd was golf design’s new hot name. He picked up exciting jobs around the world – including the Nanea course in Hawaii, for the billionaire financier Charles Schwab, but his next big splash would be a lot closer to home.
“I was building Nanea when my dad went to a dinner at the R&A in St Andrews,” he says. “Gordon Moir, who was then the links superintendent, asked him if I would be interested in building a course in St Andrews. They were in the early stages of planning for the seventh course, what became the Castle, belonging to the town. My dad called me the next day, and obviously I wasn’t going to say no. There were 20 firms that bid for the job.”
Kidd and Paul Kimber, then his right-hand man, led the firm’s final presentation for the job. “It was in the links clubhouse in St Andrews,” says Kidd. “At the end, Alan McGregor, the Links Trust’s general manager, told me that they were hiring me. I drove back to Auchterarder, where my parents lived, and told my dad that his son was going to build the first 18-hole golf course at the Home of Golf for a hundred years. He might have shed a few tears that evening. He gave me some great advice – that I had to build something that I could live with, and that’s why we tried to be bold and creative.”
‘I told my dad that his son was going to build the first 18-hole golf course at the Home of Golf for a hundred years,’ reminisces Kidd, of his appointment to design the Castle course at St Andrews, Credit: St Andrews Links Trust
The Castle course divided opinion when it opened. Fellow architect Tom Doak famously awarded it a zero rating – meaning that he believed it should never have been built – in his Confidential Guide. The extreme greens, and the liberal use of hairy mounds in the line of play attracted a lot of negative comment, but Kidd says that time – and, it must be said, some judicious softening – has proved him right. “It was polarising then, but I don’t hear much of that now,” he says. “With a little bit of time to mature and for the polarising opinions to subside, I think it has proved to be a success.”
Kidd and his crew built another high-profile course in the UK around that time, but it was the polar opposite of the Castle. Machrihanish Dunes was a true links course, the first ever to be permitted entirely within a Site of Special Scientific Interest. Getting the permits required the team to sign up for some extremely rigorous environmental oversight, with a resident ecologist from Scottish Natural Heritage following them at every step. No disturbance of the ground was allowed except to build greens and tees, and the areas of the site that were ruled completely off limits unarguably compromised the course, making for a long and difficult walk. But it was still a major achievement for Kidd, who had spent childhood holidays at Machrihanish, gazing out into the dunes at the end of the existing course there and dreaming of one day being able to build in them. And the fact that the course was built so cheaply was a major factor in making it sustainable. “I don’t think we spent a million pounds to build Machrihanish Dunes!” he says.
It was around the time of the opening of Machrihanish Dunes, in 2009, that Kidd’s UK story started to reach its ending. The Great Recession of 2007-08 was disastrous for golf development all over the world, but in the UK, where budgets were generally low, and where Kidd was maintaining a substantial payroll, it was catastrophic. “The recession of 2007 caused everything to dry up in the UK,” he says. “We continued to do well until 2009 and then the work just dried up. I either had to close everything down or figure out how to create a lifeboat, and I decided I had a better chance to do that in the US than the UK. I closed my UK office down by the end of 2009 – that was the most painful business thing I’ve had to do. The people I was working with had been with me for a long time and I regarded them as great friends.”
So, Kidd upped sticks and moved to Oregon, where he had first made his name. He continues to work around the world – he built the Beaverbrook course to the south of London, which opened in 2016, and finally got to finish the Dunas course at the Comporta resort in Portugal, which was mostly built before its developer, the Espirito Santo banking family, went rather spectacularly bust in 2014. But he is US-based, as is his team – which caused issues when Comporta came alive again during the Covid pandemic (see GCA issue 73 for more details on Comporta). He became an American citizen in 2015. “I’d been a green card holder for ten years and I had started hearing rumours about immigration restrictions,” he says. “A green card isn’t for ever, you have to renew it, so I took citizenship.”
His American years have also been up and down. He built a number of courses, including the Stonebrae club in California, and Tetherow in Bend, Oregon, now his home club in his hometown, that were criticised for being overly severe, in both greens and fairway contours. And then, he had an awakening.
“I can almost remember the moment,” he says. “Golf magazine had an ‘Architect of the Year’ award, and I won it in 2008. By any measure, I was crushing it. But I would sit at the bar at Tetherow, and I would hear people come in, beaten up, no golf balls left, and saying, ‘I’m not good enough to play this course’. I thought ‘I don’t hear that at Bandon. What has happened in the 10 years between the two?’ I had a lot of time to reflect then, because business was so poor, but I was able to say to Nick [Schaan] and Casey [Krahenbuhl], who were the only people working for me at the time, ‘Let’s go to Bandon for a week, and spend it deconstructing what makes those courses work’. I had to figure out what my instincts had been at the time and how I had changed.”
Machrihanish Dunes, on Scotland’s west coast, was a dream project for Kidd, who holidayed in the area during his youth, Credit: Machrihanish Dunes
Through this process, Kidd became a born-again advocate for courses that make golfers smile. This insight has not been without criticism – some of his courses built since, notably the appropriately named Mammoth Dunes, the second course at the Sand Valley resort in Wisconsin, and Gamble Sands in Washington, have been accused of taking the doctrine of width to excess, and pandering to golfers who just want to stand on the tee and whale away, with no concern about where the ball might go, but in general, it has been a great success.
“Architecture post-Pete Dye has created green complexes where recovery from missing the green is much harder than it needs to be,” says Kidd. “If you look at the first course at Gamble Sands, it is maybe a little bit easier than it should be. I don’t want to hand you double bogey if you miss a green, but at the same time I don’t want you always to make par either. It needs to be a challenge. How much punishment does a player deserve?
“My team and I are finding incremental ways to make golf courses more fun. Width is just the beginning. If I were teaching a class on golf design, width would be in the first lesson. We’re now looking at things like the challenge of recovery. PGA Tour players hit greens 62 per cent of the time, and now we have data from Arcos that shows amateurs do so about half as often – less than one in three. That means that the recovery game is far more important than greens in regulation. We’re spending vastly more time figuring out what happens when people miss greens. How much of an interesting challenge is it?”
Kidd’s Bone Valley layout at the Streamsong resort in Florida will open for preview play in October 2026, Credit: Evan Schiller
This message is proving popular, with golfers and developers alike. Kidd and his team are wildly busy: they have completed Bone Valley, the fifth course at the Streamsong resort in Florida, which is now growing in for a formal opening at the start of 2027, and they are building a private course for the Peed family, owners of the Dormie Network, in Nebraska. He has other projects in California, Florida, Texas and Washington. And Kidd still holds to his belief that design and build is the best way to construct golf courses. Many of his peers, such as Tom Doak, have pioneered a ‘design and shape’ model, where the fine work of building greens and features is done by staff shapers, but the financial risks of taking on full turnkey contracts have generally been too much for architects to stomach.
Kidd doesn’t share that nervousness. “We have been doing design and build forever: the Castle course was a design-and-build job,” he says. “Our process lowers the risk enormously; we are extremely engaged so the opportunity for something to spiral out of control is near zero. The worst we had was a massive 1,000-year flood hit mid-construction at Rolling Hills in LA. A $30 million insurance claim later, we were way behind schedule and going through lots of heartache, but we still got everything back together and kept everyone happy. Golf architecture is more art and sculpture than engineering and architecture, and the process of realisation must account for that. So, we self-build.”
The par-three fifteenth at Guacalito de la Isla in Nicaragua, Credit: DMK Golf Design
David McLay Kidd is not yet 60, but he has seen and done more than most could in three lifetimes. And he is responsible for one of the more remarkable things I have seen in my years with this magazine. Thirteen years ago, I went with him to see Guacalito de la Isla, the course he built for Nicaraguan entrepreneur Carlos Pellas Chamorro. And in a world where architects are still entranced by the template holes pioneered by Charles Blair Macdonald, he pushed the boat a little further out than most. The par-three fifteenth features a green that was based on two templates: it is a hybrid of the Redan and Biarritz holes, featuring a swale in the middle of the green and a slope that players can use to run their ball through the swale and access rear pins. “Nick [Schaan] and I laugh about that,” he says. “One of my pet peeves is the whole template thing – I think it’s wildly overdone. We always say, ‘We’re going to build another Redanarritzerran’. It’s our code for ‘We can’t think of anything to do, let’s build a template’. It’s not that they’re bad, but from my point of view I think they’re a fallback for when you can’t come up with a new idea.”
This article first appeared in the July 2026 issue of Golf Course Architecture. For a printed subscription or free digital edition, please visit our subscriptions page.