45 of stormwater runoff, provide a certain amount of fill for the homes, and provide a certain amount of golf course views from the homes. “Fast forward to 1994, and I had started my own business. I was just starting off, and I did Old Memorial in Tampa for the founders of Outback Steakhouse. It was very strongly criticised in the golf industry at the time because it didn’t have real estate, and people said it would never make it. “I found the site, and there was only three feet of elevation change across the entire property. There is always some movement on a property – water movement, tree lines, vegetation – always something that catches your eye, no matter how boring the site is, and I look for that. At Old Memorial, we had natural lakes, which were nice, and an area of oak trees – what I call ‘landscape rooms’. I tried to create a journey through those rooms to create variety in the setting. I didn’t want every hole to be the same. Although we didn’t have movement in the land, we had spatial settings, and were able to create features that would be in keeping with the land. There were some unique features – there always are – so I tried to create patterns to make the eye move around the property and give you a good feeling about the site. I tried to create a dominant point on each hole that your eye would focus on.” A long time ago, I was lucky enough to travel with Smyers to Iceland, where he had been hired to build a course on the country’s south coast, among dunes made of black volcanic sand. To this day, I remember vividly what he told me on the way to the site: that he had spent his life working on projects that demanded massive amounts of engineering to make them function as courses. So, when he got the Icelandic job, he was excited. Finally, he would get chance to work on a property naturally suited for golf and be able simply to lay the holes out on the ground. When he got to the site, however, he found that the dunes were not grassed, but incredibly mobile, with sand blowing everywhere, and would require even more engineering than his other jobs! The project, sadly, never came to fruition, a casualty of the financial crisis of 2007-08. Australian architect Neil Crafter says his toughest site was his most recent; the rebuild of the Chatswood course to the north-west of Sydney. “The old course was a very small eighteen with three crossing holes,” he explains. “The club did a deal with a developer to build retirement apartments in the area that used to be its car park and clubhouse, and that funded the rebuilding of the course as twelve holes – we believe the first purpose-built twelve-hole course in Australia. Building the apartments required a substantial excavation CHALLENGING SITES Photo: Neil Crafter Neil Crafter says his toughest site is his most recent, the Chatswood course north-west of Sydney, Australia
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