79 Herb Kohler began developing golf in east Wisconsin, around the area in which his family’s eponymous bathroom products company is based, in the 1980s. Along with Pete Dye, Herb built four 18-hole courses over a 10-year period: the River and Meadow Valleys courses at Blackwolf Run, and the Straits and Irish at Whistling Straits, on the banks of Lake Michigan. The Kohler resorts have been a major success, with the Straits hosting three PGA Championships, a US Senior Open and the 2021 Ryder Cup. Herb and Chris Lutzke, a Dye protégé, built the 10-hole par-three Baths course at Blackwolf Run, which opened in 2021, but there has been no full-sized course opened at Kohler since 2000. Herb died, aged 83, in 2022, and his son David, who now runs the company, has decided to build more golf. “Three years ago, I was contacted by Dirk Willis, then the Kohler vice president in charge of the golf operation, by email,” says Rob Collins of King Collins Dormer (KCD). He said, ‘We’re interested in having you guys come up and take a look at a piece of property and meeting David and his wife Nina’. We had a great dinner and woke up the next morning to an email from David Kohler saying we were hired.” The property in question was a tract of land about 135 acres in size, a little small for an 18-hole course by today’s standards, to the west of Blackwolf Run, previously used for farming and separated from the Sheboygan River by woodland. “Pete did some routings on this property while he was working with Herb, but it had been put on the back burner,” says Collins. “The project went through a number of different iterations – we did several different routings – and it was put to the side for a little while. Dirk called a year and a half ago and said, ‘The project is active, we want to go for it, but we want to downsize a little – can you give us a routing that’s less than 18 holes?’” Collins, who has never met an envelope he didn’t want to push, was delighted, and eventually came up with a solution that was unusual even A huge bunker complex is planned for the opening hole “ I did a couple of different routing studies, and 14 holes came out the best” Image: Harris Kalinka
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