The Harvester Club

Though barely two decades old, The Harvester Club has led an adventurous life. It came into the world at the end of the 1990s as a course of its time: that is, an upscale daily-fee design 30 minutes northeast of Des Moines with snaking fairways and curvacious, modern-looking bunkering. A renovation in 2010 began to alter their character, roughing up the edges and giving the course a more rustic look. In 2017, the owners reversed course and took the club private, hiring original architect Keith Foster to remove trees to better highlight the site’s hills and prairie terrain and to revamp the holes with new tees and wider, less snaking fairways. Foster also reimagined the course as a paean to early 20th-century architecture, constructing more squared-off greens, shifting new flat-bottomed grass-faced bunkers to more interesting and impactful locations, and adding thematic riffs on a Road Hole green, a Tillinghast-inspired Hell’s Half Acre, a Short Hole and an Oakmont-like Church Pews bunker.