44 C M Y CM MY CY CMY K it is perhaps unsurprising that their professional relationship is very close. Ramsey says this is a fundamental part of their success. “Dave and I believe two heads are better than one and we work together on nearly every design,” he says. “We have a collaborative spirit and are always bouncing ideas off each other and reviewing each other’s concepts. In some cases, we have actually worked on the same drawing at the same time to meet a client’s time request. We have worked together for 27 years and know each other quite well. We now spend more and more time together on site to give our clients the full benefit of the team not just in the design but the implementation. This allows us to cover more ground while on site.” Similarly, the team at European Golf Design, which includes managing director Jeremy Slessor, five lead architects and a backroom team, are all based together in one office in Sunningdale, England. EGD projects are generally managed by one of the firm’s lead designers, but Slessor says proximity means the team can work together closely on an informal basis. “Every project has a lead, and we don’t put two or three guys on a project, but beyond there is a lot of peering at drawing boards and asking, ‘Why are you doing it like that?’” he says. “We don’t have one guy doing the grading, another doing the green designs and another the drainage, because I think that’s counter-productive – you’d end up with inconsistencies across the plans. Being in the same office does help a lot – one of the downsides of business life post-Covid is that working from home has become more normal, and if you’re not in the office you don’t have the same interaction with other people. We’ve proved that you don’t need to be in the office all the time to be productive, but I do think there is a downside to being isolated at home. “One thing that gives us an edge is the number of projects that we’ve done with ‘signatures’, where by definition there is a degree of collaboration that doesn’t exist on other projects.” The firm of Coore & Crenshaw is famously collegial, so it is perhaps unsurprising that a number of longtime C&C associates have something to say on collaboration. Trevor Dormer, who worked with C&C for many years before joining up with Rob Collins and Tad King in the firm of King Collins Dormer, says that, contrary COLLABORATION Kevin Ramsey and David Dale of Golfplan say they work together on nearly all of their designs Photo: Golfplan
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