Architectural intuition

A common courtesy, or perhaps a common punishment, of being a professional in 2026 is being asked how Artificial Intelligence might improve your job.

That opening sentence sounds like it belongs beneath a headshot on LinkedIn, probably next to the words disruption, workflow and unlocking potential. But the question keeps appearing, and in golf course architecture, it is genuinely interesting. So, against everyone’s better judgement, including my own, it seems worth exploring.

If we were to imagine a blank canvas, land surveyed, boundaries defined, contours mapped, and the site sitting there waiting to become a golf course, the immediate temptation is to ask AI to design it. Feed the machine the data, press the button, and wait for eighteen holes to appear like some strange architectural microwave meal.

But I don’t think that is where its value lies.

The value, at least today, is not in replacing architectural intuition. It is in informing it.

AI could become a way of gathering, sorting and testing the layers that already influence good design. The architect still needs to decide what matters, what to ignore, what to exaggerate, and what to ruin beautifully with a bulldozer. But AI may help us see the site more clearly before we start pretending we saw it all along.

Prevailing Winds

Most parts of the world have recorded wind data. In theory, AI could help translate that information into something useful during routing.

Not simply “the wind comes from the south-west”, but how often, how strongly, and at what times of year. That could influence hole direction, length, par, and the balance of the round.

The goal would be to avoid designing a course where the golfer spends four hours slugging shots into the wind like they are trapped on some horror golfing treadmill, questioning their hobbies and possibly their marriage.

Hydrology

Water is one of the great, unglamorous foundations of golf architecture.

It determines where turf survives, where foot traffic gathers, where machinery can move, where greens should sit, and where the land quietly says, “please don’t build that here.”

Much of this is still understood by walking the site, watching it, feeling it underfoot, and seeing what happens after rain. But AI could help layer hydrology data over the property in a way that gives the architect a clearer early understanding of the site’s behaviour.

It could help identify natural green sites, sensible tee locations, drainage corridors, wet areas, dry ridges, and the places where intervention might be necessary. Not to remove feel from the process, but to support it.

Demographic

Golfers are not all the same, which is an obvious statement that somehow still needs repeating.

If a club understands who is actually playing the course, how far they hit it, how widely they disperse it, and where they struggle, AI could help shape a more intelligent design response.

This does not mean building a course by spreadsheet. That sounds horrible. But it may help determine how many teeing areas are really needed, where they should go, and whether variety is more valuable than simply stretching the course backwards until everyone is miserable.

A better understanding of golfers could lead to better shared experiences. The same bunker, the same water hazard, the same angle of attack, but encountered differently by different players.

That is where design becomes interesting.

Scale

Scale is one of the great hidden ingredients of golf architecture.

The length of holes, the size of greens, the width of fairways, the scale of bunkers, the climb of the land, the rhythm of par, the feeling of moving through space. All of it matters.

AI could help set broad tolerances. Minimum and maximum hole lengths. Green sizes. Bunker scales. Tee locations. Walking distances. Elevation changes. The distribution of par across the round.

The more generous the tolerance, the more likely we are to find variety. The tighter the tolerance, the more likely the golf course begins to feel like it was extruded from a municipal sausage machine.

They say variety is the spice of life. Personally, I like a golf course with a kick.

Iteration

One of the first principles taught in architecture school is the value of iteration.

Do it again. Try it another way. Turn it upside down. Make the bad version. Find the mistake that becomes the idea.

Golf architecture has always had this. Many clubhouses have a framed routing plan on the wall, usually admired by golf nerds who stare at it with the emotional intensity of people reading a lost religious text.

“What could have been.”

“The missing holes.”

“The alternate seventh.”

AI could make this process faster. Not better by default, but faster. It could produce routing options in seconds, allowing the architect to compare different approaches, red-line them, combine them, reject them, and begin designing from a more informed position.

The danger, of course, is mistaking speed for quality. A quick answer is not necessarily a good one. It is just quicker at being wrong.

But as a tool for iteration, AI could be genuinely powerful.

The Human Part

I am still a novice in how I use AI, and AI is still a novice in golf course architecture, although probably learning at a more alarming rate than I am.

But even today, much of what I have described feels possible. With the right data, the right prompts, and a patient enough operator, AI could already help test winds, hydrology, demographics, scale and routing options.

At the moment, getting there might take a couple of days of careful prompting, failed attempts, strange outputs, and the occasional result that makes you wonder if the machine has ever seen a golf course, or grass.

In a few years, that same process may take seconds.

I am in favour of that.

Not because I want AI to design golf courses, but because I want more time to break the rules of the plans it produces. More time to walk the site. More time to stand on a green pad and decide it should move three metres left. More time to shape the land, test the idea, and find the little moments that no dataset can quite understand.

Golf architecture has always lived somewhere between information and instinct.

AI may improve the information.

The instinct still has to come from somewhere else.

French Chardonnay in the Napa Valley

There’s something slightly disarming about arriving at Brambles. Not because of what it is, but because of what it isn’t trying to be. In an era where new golf courses tend to arrive fully dressed for the part, pressed, polished, and pre-approved by an imaginary panel of investors and Instagram architects, Brambles feels… unfinished. And that’s precisely its charm.

Opened in 2024 in Middletown, this is a course that doesn’t present itself as a final statement. It plays more like a question than an answer. There is a visible restraint here, a willingness to leave space for the course to evolve rather than forcing it into a fixed identity too early. It suggests an open-minded curiosity from its creators, not just about what the course is, but what it might become.

The approach to 16 Green.

Because modern golf development, particularly in the wake of the game’s recent boom, has leaned toward two predictable poles. Commercially safe imitations on one side, echoes of what has already worked, repackaged with just enough variation to feel new. On the other, courses that lean heavily on spectacular settings, where the land does most of the storytelling and the golf simply follows along politely. Brambles resists both. It feels less like a finished product and more like something in flux. Alive, slightly unsettled, and all the better for it.

And perhaps the best way to understand it is through wine.

Chardonnay, in 2026, broadly lives in two worlds. There’s the French expression, restrained, mineral-driven, lightly touched by oak. It doesn’t announce itself. It unfolds. Texture over power. Precision over presence. Then there’s the Napa Valley style, rich, full-bodied, unapologetically buttery. It arrives fully formed, confident, immediate.

Brambles is unmistakably the former, set right in the heart of the latter.

Within reach of Napa Valley, where boldness has long been the prevailing language, Brambles feels almost rebellious in its restraint. A French Chardonnay in Napa country. It goes against the grain, not loudly, but quietly, confidently.

There’s a sensation here that’s difficult to articulate but instantly recognisable. Playing Brambles today feels akin to stepping into the early life of the courses we now revere. Not as museum pieces, but as living, breathing experiments. Before the edges were refined, before reputations calcified, before mythology took hold. For better or worse, it evokes something like Augusta National Golf Club in its infancy. Not in grandeur or ambition, but in spirit. A place still figuring itself out.

And that lack of polish is not a flaw. It’s the point.

There are moments where the ground feels unresolved, where lines are still being discovered rather than dictated. Greens that don’t yet feel like they’ve settled into their final expressions. Edges that blur instead of declare. But within that ambiguity lies the thrill. The golf is engaging, often surprising, occasionally uneven, but always alive. It asks you to participate, not just execute.

This isn’t a blight on the course. It’s what makes it compelling. Inspiring, even. There’s ambition here, but it’s patient. It trusts that time, play, and subtle iteration will reveal what Brambles ultimately wants to be.

The risk & reward of the 9th fairway.

That philosophy feels deeply aligned with the work of Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw, whose fingerprints are all over the place, alongside the very real dream of their long-time associate James Duncan. This isn’t architecture chasing applause. It’s architecture willing to wait.

Because Napa didn’t become Napa by accident. Robert Mondavi and his contemporaries helped define a style that was confident, expressive, and immediately recognisable. Big wines, fully realised, built to leave an impression. In many ways, modern golf architecture has followed a similar path. Capable of delivering finished products from day one, polished and complete.

But standing on the ground at Brambles, it’s hard not to feel the appeal of something else. Something a little less resolved. A little more patient. Like those French Chardonnays that don’t give you everything up front, that ask for time, and reward it quietly.

Brambles doesn’t quite tell you what it is just yet.

And that might be the most interesting thing about it.

Happy Golfing,

One of my favourite clubhouses.

Season One: 7 Mile Beach Review

The anticipation to play 7 Mile Beach had been simmering for years. Like waiting for a new HBO prestige series that teases with glimpses of drama and cliffhangers, but never confirms the premiere date. Some people have been waiting nearly a decade. Matty Goggin has been waiting his entire life. My own anticipation began in 2020 when I was approached to help with the branding. Suddenly, it felt like stepping onto a carefully lit set, each dune and fairway waiting for its scene.

Goggin is the producer, the Hobart native with a vision too big to be contained. The director is Mike DeVries, who loves getting his hands dirty on set, framing every shot and shaping the action. Beside him is co-creator Mike Clayton, acting as the seasoned show runner. While DeVries manages the technical production, Clayton focuses on the narrative arc, ensuring the pacing is right and that every scene flows logically into the next. Lukas Michel, the script supervisor, working within the margins to ensure continuity, subtly nudging the production back on course whenever the plot threatens to drift.

Episode One opens like a slow tracking shot over a quiet dune. The fairway introduces the cast and characters but saves its best action for the final reveal. The green unfolds like a secret location revealed at the climax of a scene. Elegant, refined, and deceptive in its simplicity. You only notice the subtleties after stepping off, the contours and movements whispering, the ball rolling with a life of its own. It is a green that sets the tone, a promise that the story will reward those paying attention.

Episode Two is a par 3, a tight and dramatic bottle episode with a panoramic reveal. The green sits high and halfway up a dune overlooking Tiger Head Bay. The wind tugs at your clothing, smells of salt and grass drift together, and the horizon stretches like the opening credits of a sprawling saga. You sense the vastness of the course in that single view, the world that you’re embarking on and the drama of the season waiting to unfold across every hole.

Episodes Three and Four toss in plot twists that feel designed by writers who enjoy toying with their audience. Episode Five is a marketing dream. The poster shot. The still frame that sells the whole series. Then the run from Eight to Fourteen begins and the show stops caring about your emotions. It simply hits its stride and gushes creativity. These holes feel alive. They feel like the late night binge watch when you promise yourself you will stop at one more episode before bed but then find yourself three episodes deeper and fully hypnotised.

The Double Header Monster 8th

The middle stretch from Episodes Eight through to Fourteen is pure cinema. Twists and turns, subtle tricks, moments that feel like the true realisation of the 7 Mile Experience. A hypnotic montage of brilliant and surprising moments. The fairways roll, sand brushes against shoes, the ball teeters unpredictably. Gusts of wind whip across the dunes, carrying the scent of wildflowers and salt, each hole a minor drama building toward a crescendo. Episode Thirteen is my personal favorite. A sequence so unique it could exist nowhere else. The kind of episode that leaves you breathless, the ball a tiny actor in a grand production.

The finale, Episode Eighteen, is cinematic in every sense. A long par 5 that feels like the closing act of a season finale. A giant central bunker sits ahead like a prophecy carved into sand. It looks fatal. It looks final. You think the scene will claim a beloved character, a last-minute heartbreak. Then the illusion breaks. There is still 150 yards of story left to play. The bunker is a teasing interlude, the green a wild and jagged stage, nothing like the elegant opening of the first hole. Sunlight catches the slopes, wind rustles the dunes, and every step, every putt feels like a final shot in a beautifully directed scene. Some players will embrace the chaos. Others will drift into their own fan fiction, imagining the practice green perched higher on the dune as the true finale. Great prestige television teaches us that endings provoke debate, and 7 Mile Beach delivers with confidence, leaving you with the want of replaying the television series again and again.

The tasteful artwork placed within the halfway house/shelter, wonderfully showcases local talent and compliments the art that exists over the 18 holes of golf. A nice touch.

What lifts the entire production into something distinctly Australian is the world surrounding the course. The halfway house refuses clichés. No gaudy images of fairways plastered on walls. Instead, walls are adorned with genuine Australian art. The smell of freshly baked meat pies fills the air, local pastries and produce reminding you that this is home. The merchandise celebrates Australian makers and identity. No imported gloss, no awkward imitation of overseas luxury. The entire experience feels grounded, authentic, and distinctly Australian.

The best scene of the day, however, was unscripted. As we left for Hobart, a handful of schoolgirls hopped out of a car with clubs over their shoulders, ready for a twilight round. The future of junior golf in Tasmania glimmered at that moment. Young Australians taking ownership of a space built for them, a quiet but compelling post-credit scene hinting at what the next season could hold.

Season One of 7 Mile Beach is a triumph. A uniquely Australian story told with ambition, courage, and flair. DeVries delivers a compelling narrative with tension and character. Goggin has willed a dream into existence. Australia now has a new series to celebrate. Something grand. Something alive. Something with enough cliffhangers, twists, and cinematic moments to keep you hooked until the next season arrives.

Happy Golfing

The Bayonne Burger

Picture a Wall Street worker. His eyes are glued to the Hudson from the 40th floor. His brain has been melted by markets, deals, and endless numbers. He is starving for something simple, indulgent, and immediate. He wants a burger from Hamburger America on the way home to his West Village apartment. He wants a round of golf. The craving is urgent and unpretentious. Bayonne Golf Club is that ferry ride, the wrapper in his hand, the sizzle on the grill, the quick bite that satisfies without demanding contemplation.

The course coils and twists like a boa constrictor’s stomach. Fairways squeeze, angles tighten, and approaches close in like a digestive muscle around prey that has nowhere to run. You feel it pressing, constricting, shaping your shots without ceremony. It is not elegant. It is not refined. It is alive in the bluntest, most immediate way, demanding your attention.

The Bayonne-Constrictor

The borrowed landscape does most of the heavy lifting. Factories rise like sentinels, churches spire skyward, and the Statue of Liberty appears off in the distance. These are foreign ingredients in a strange recipe, points of aim that turn mundane shots into moments of unexpected delight. Watching them is like perching on a stool at the bar of Hamburger America. You see the line of cooks at work, taking basic elements and somehow making something worth enjoying. The water flashes silver, the mounds rise and fall, and suddenly the ordinary site has rhythm, choreography, and a sly grin hidden in the details.

Bayonne does not ask for reverence. It does not pretend to be Noma. Each hole is flavorful enough to make you nod in approval, fun enough to leave you smiling, but none are revolutionary. The satisfaction is immediate. You bite into it, chew, swallow, and move on. The taste lingers for a moment, enough to remember, but not enough to redefine your standards. It delivers what it promises, and it does not promise more than it can give.

Playing here feels good. It scratches that craving like a burger in the late afternoon. It fills the moment with pleasure, indulgence, and a touch of cunning. The fairways, the skyline, the twists of land all combine to create something lively and spirited. You walk away content. You enjoyed it. That is the experience. Nothing more, nothing less.

Bayonne Golf Club is a burger. Savory, indulgent, slightly messy, and clever in ways you might not expect. It is not world-class. It is not transformational. It is exactly the kind of thing you want when the craving hits. And sometimes, that is more than enough.

Happy Golfing

Quintessentially American

Well, I’m having trouble knowing where to begin with Sleepy Hollow. Just as much trouble, in fact, as knowing where to end. I could save us both some time by summing it up in a single line: Sleepy Hollow is the most quintessential American golf course. There. Done. No elaboration required. Move on with your life.

But maybe I need to sleep on that notion. It is October after all, and my brain may be swimming in a pumpkin-spiced fog. The leaves on the deciduous trees are in full retreat, our tee time was delayed by autumn frost, and here we are, playing golf on what feels like Halloween’s home turf. Maybe I’m just under the influence of a holiday that I have always tied closely to this country.

It could be the way the course looks over the Hudson River, that wide tidal estuary that once carried the economic lifeblood of a nation inland, linking canals and tributaries that pushed America’s industrial heart westward. It pulled the centre of gravity away from the colonial ports of Boston and Philadelphia and into a new era.

Or maybe it is the Gilded Age history baked into the property. This land once belonged to Colonel Shepard and Margaret Vanderbilt, who envisioned a manor of unapologetic opulence. Then came the titans: Rockefeller, Vanderbilt, Astor, Vanderlip, Harriman, Macy, Choate and Colgate. Their vision was to reshape and reprogram the land with golf, and for that they summoned Charles Blair Macdonald, the godfather of American golf architecture. Macdonald’s fingerprints are all over the nation’s early great courses, his designs setting a blueprint for what American golf would become.

The focal lone tree located central to the course.

Not long after, Albert Warren Tillinghast added his own eccentric brilliance. He was a man who designed as though possessed, free, unfiltered and untethered by modern constraint. The early twentieth century was golf architecture’s golden age, and Sleepy Hollow stands as a living, breathing artifact of that time.

Standing on the property, looking across the broad, sweeping landscape, my tiny brain struggled to make sense of it all. The place is enormous. The beauty, almost theatrical. The course matches nature’s energy with grand, deliberate gestures. At times it drapes itself elegantly over the terrain, flowing down hollows and across rocky shoulders. At others, it thrusts greens high into the air, connected by ornate footbridges that seem as if they have always belonged.

That is what I love about the Macdonald, Raynor and Banks style. They did not simply blend their work into the environment. They formalised it. They celebrated it. They took the drama of nature and set it to a template, like a jazz musician riffing on a familiar tune. It is not subtle. It does not need to be. The course wants to be part of the story, like a mascot on the sidelines, waving its arms and urging the crowd to join in.

Sleepy Hollow is Halloween, Gilded Age grandeur and American golf mythology all rolled into one. It is a love letter written in stone, soil and template greens. Like any great American story, it is part history, part theatre, part self-mythologising, and entirely unforgettable.

Walking off the 18th green and you don’t need to be a golfing savant to know that you’ve completed a special round of golf. A round of golf that perfectly encapsulates golf in America.

Happy Golfing

The Point of it All

The famous fog that blankets the West Coast in the summer was lifting around the  Monterey Peninsula. The air was still, and the sound of our group’s quiet conversation carried across the fairways. A family of deer played in the unusually long grass, left to grow for the upcoming Walker Cup, the seals were sunbathing on the warm rocks and the sea otters were playing with one of my golf balls that I had donated into the Pacific Ocean. Four holes in, I caught myself thinking that Cypress Point feels less like your everyday golf course and more like a dream state. It is a feeling that seems to stretch all the way back to the people who first imagined the potential of this corner of the coast, to Marion Hollins and Samuel Finley Brown Morse. Two incredibly successful individuals that zagged away from the social perils of New York during the gilded age and found themselves a part of the exotic coastal nature and Spanish colonial homes of the Monterey Peninsula.

Now, I should admit from the outset, I am no authority on Cypress Point or on Dr. Alister MacKenzie’s written works. I certainly cannot quote him verbatim, nor have I ticked off every course of his around the world. I only have the perspective of a visiting golfer, and one who is prone to interpreting things through his own lens. With that caveat in mind, what I felt here was less about conventional wisdom of the ‘Good Doctor’ that tends to permeate through his existing work. The golf course at Cypress Point, is one that has an undercurrent of joy. And for that, I think we may have Marion Hollins to thank.

Photo By Julian P. Graham/Loon Hill Studios

Morse, the developer, provided the capital and the confidence to shape this stretch of coastline. Hollins, though, gave it its character. She was supremely talented and lived a life that might have been lifted from the pages of The Great Gatsby. Officially, she was employed as ‘Athletic Director’ of Del Monte Properties. Her remit was to create and implement sporting programmes for a prosperous clientele, the sort of people who had succeeded in the American Dream and wanted a suitable playground in which to spend it. That was the job description in black and white. The reality was far more interesting. Hollins was, in every sense, the region’s director of fun.

She had an eye for adventure, a talent for sport and an energy that seemed to bend people to her vision. Where others might have seen an inhospitable coastline of dunes, pines and rocky outcrops, she saw possibility. She was the one who persuaded MacKenzie to take on Cypress Point, ensuring that the course would carry both his strategic brilliance and her sense of playfulness. The result is a course that tests and thrills in equal measure. There are moments when the golf is serious, demanding and even daunting, yet there is always a thread of delight that runs through it. That, to me, feels like Hollins’ lasting imprint.

Playing Cypress Point today, especially on the eve of the Walker Cup, is to feel that legacy alive. It is impossible not to be caught up in the rhythm of it all, the variety, the sheer beauty of each hole, and the way the course invites courage without ever losing its smile. Hollins may not be the household name mentioned this week, credited for its current state, but her influence is everywhere on this dreamscape.

Which brings me back to the point of it all! If Marion Hollins were alive in 2025, what would she make of what Cypress Point has become? I cannot answer with authority, but my hunch is that she should be proud. Proud of the vision, proud of the joy and proud that fun still lives at the very centre of this extraordinary place.

Happy Golfing