By Richard Humphreys |
The July 2026 issue of Golf Course Architecture is out now.
The cover of our new release features The Cliffs Kangaroo Island, photographed by Jacob Sjöman. Australia’s latest bucket-list layout was designed by Darius Oliver and built on a rugged landscape a short flight from Adelaide. We speak with the architect, plus developer Sam Atkins, about The Cliffs as it prepares to open in October 2026.
“We needed to build it because you could just see where it was sitting on the ground,” says Atkins. “It had to be a golf course.”
In the main feature of this issue, ‘New golf in the old country’, we report on the boom in major golf developments in the UK and Ireland. We profile 18 projects that are either on the drawing board, in progress or opening imminently. These include Gil Hanse’s work at Sunningdale and North Berwick, European Golf Design’s complete redesign of La Grande Mare on the island of Guernsey, a pair of Ryder Cup hopefuls in England, and several entirely new golf courses.
Renaissance Golf Design is working on a golf course renovation at St George’s Hill in Surrey, England (Photo: St George’s Hill)
Toby Ingleton visited Ballybunion Golf Club on Ireland’s south-west coast, to tour the club’s Cashen course, which lies immediately south of its famed Old course, in the same stretch of dunes. Team Niblick and Tom Watson Design have collaborated on a major renovation to fulfil the potential of Robert Trent Jones’s original 1982 routing.
“The redesign has opened up approaches, creating more options into the greens and restoring a stronger ground game element to the course,” says Graeme Webster of Team Niblick.
The par-four fifth on Ballybunion’s Cashen course plays directly alongside the Atlantic Ocean (Photo: Kieran Ryan-Benson)
Richard Humphreys headed to the Middle East to visit the new Brian Curley-designed Shura Links course, which is laid out on an island just off Saudi Arabia’s Red Sea coast. He also visited Interlachen CC in Florida, where Fazio Design has revitalised the course with a redesign that also makes it better equipped to withstand extreme weather events.
The green of the par-five fifth (left) and par-three sixth holes at Shura Links in Saudi Arabia (Photo: Kevin Murray)
Our feature interview is with David McLay Kidd, whose big break came in his late twenties, when Mike Keiser hired him to create Bandon Dunes. Thirty years later, Kidd is one of golf design’s biggest names, with a portfolio including designs at Machrihanish Dunes, Sand Valley, Gamble Sands, Comporta, Streamsong and the home of golf, St Andrews. We speak with David about his career and how his design philosophy has evolved over the years.
“My team and I are finding incremental ways to make golf courses more fun,” says Kidd. “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.”
David McLay Kidd on the site of his Loraloma layout in Texas, which opened in 2025 (Photo: Fire Pit Productions)
Elsewhere, we have contributions from John Clarkin of Turfgrass, who talks about the importance of early agronomic input in golf course projects; and Aaron Gagnon of Hunter, who discusses irrigation work at Österåkers Golfklubb in Sweden that helped to elevate aesthetics, playability and sustainability.
We also report on the Jeremy Pern-designed Ouidah course, the first 18-hole layout in the West African nation of Benin; the South course at Carmel CC in North Carolina, where Rees Jones has overseen four decades of work; and Augusta Municipal Golf Course, also known as The Patch, which has reopened its golf facilities following projects by Tom Fazio, Beau Welling and Tiger Woods’ TGR Design.
The Jeremy Pern-designed Ouidah course in Benin (Photo: Afrikafun Production/ Stephane Brabant)
Before all that, the issue opens as always with our Tee Box section, a round-up of news from around the globe, which this issue covers Ally McIntosh’s renovation at Carne Golf Links in Ireland; Carlton Marshall Golf Design’s new short course at Tobacco Road, The Matchbox; and a Q&A with Ray Hearn about his career and current projects.