How a Golf Course Gets Built, Routing to Opening Day

From first site walk to opening day is rarely less than two years and often considerably more. The sequence below is the one most projects follow, and the decisions that matter most are concentrated at the start, when almost nothing has been spent.

1. The site walk

Before any drawing, somebody walks the ground. Where does water go. Where does the wind come from. What are the three or four natural features the course should be built around. Which parts of the property are unbuildable and therefore free to be beautiful.

A site walk also establishes what the land cannot do. Ignoring that answer is how projects end up moving a million cubic metres to create something the ground was never going to hold.

2. Feasibility and the brief

Who plays this course, how often, at what green fee, maintained by how many people. A private club, a resort course and a municipal facility are different buildings on the same acreage. This stage sets the maintenance budget, and the maintenance budget constrains the design more than any aesthetic preference.

3. Routing

The single most consequential stage, and the cheapest to change. Routing fixes where the holes go, which means it fixes earthmoving volume, drainage strategy, irrigation runs, walk distances and whether the course has any rhythm.

Good routing finds the holes that are already there. It also solves practical problems that are invisible to players: prevailing wind across the closing stretch, morning sun on the first tee, green-to-tee walks that do not exhaust people, and a return to the clubhouse that makes a nine-hole loop possible.

4. Permitting and environmental work

Wetlands, protected habitat, water abstraction, stormwater discharge. In most jurisdictions this is the longest pole in the schedule and it runs in parallel with design rather than after it. Courses across our portfolio hold Audubon Cooperative Sanctuary and GEO certification, and the work that earns those is far easier to build in at this stage than to retrofit.

5. Clearing and earthworks

Trees down, topsoil stripped and stockpiled, bulk earth moved to rough grade. Topsoil is an asset. Losing it, burying it or letting it wash away is a cost that shows up two years later as turf that will not establish.

6. Shaping

The stage that produces the course people actually see. Green complexes, bunker faces, fairway contours, mounding. It is done by machine operators working from plans and, on the better projects, from direct conversation on the ground, because a contour that reads well on paper does not always read well at eye level.

7. Drainage, irrigation and grassing

In that order, and the order matters. Drainage first because retrofitting it means digging up finished work. Irrigation second, trenched and pressure tested before any grass goes down. Grassing last, by seed, sprig or sod depending on climate, budget and how soon the course needs to open.

8. Grow-in

Months of full maintenance cost and no revenue, while turf knits and roots establish. Opening early is the most common and most damaging economy in course construction. Turf that is played before it is ready takes years to recover, and the recovery costs more than the delay would have.

Where projects go wrong

Almost always at stage three, and almost always for the same reason: a routing chosen to maximise real estate frontage or to hit a yardage target rather than to suit the ground. Everything downstream then costs more, because every later stage is working against the site instead of with it.

See how this has played out across four decades, or talk to us about a project.