84 REPORT The tenth hole on the South course at Carmel CC, where Rees Jones has been working for more than four decades Photo: Carmel CC Never standing still For more than four decades, Rees Jones has helped Carmel Country Club adapt its South course to changing times and expectations. Golf course architecture is often viewed as a sequence of projects. A club hires an architect, work is completed, and attention turns elsewhere until another renovation becomes necessary years later. At Carmel Country Club in Charlotte, North Carolina, the approach has been different. For more than four decades, the club has worked with Rees Jones to continually refine its South course to reflect changes in the game, advances in maintenance practices and the evolving expectations of its membership. “They’ve always wanted to make their courses appropriate for the way the game is played at the time,” says Jones. “Our work there has focused on gradual improvement; it has been a continuous design project for a club that wants to stay with the times.” Jones first carried out remodelling work on the Ellis Maples design in the early 1980s, with a more substantial redesign completed in 2004. While the original routing was largely retained, Jones used additional land to introduce a new fifth hole, reverse the first and eighteenth holes and remove the original second. The work focused on rebuilding greens and adjusting several holes to improve both strategy and to create a championship challenge. More recently, attention has turned to bunkers, and the revisiting of strategic questions throughout the course. Every bunker on the South course has now been rebuilt and fitted with
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