Lakewood Country Club

Lakewood, located in a suburb west of Cleveland, opened in 1921 and is the only course in Ohio designed by A.W. Tillinghast. Like most courses of its vintage, it had been modernized through the decades and one of the club’s goals in 2020 when they hired Keith Foster, who has demonstrated his Tillinghast expertise at courses like Brook Hollow in Dallas and Philadelphia Cricket Club’s Wissahickon Course, was to return it to the original routing. The other goal was to imbue it with a more rugged, Golden Age character by converting all the bunkers from flashed sand to a more vintage grass-faced style, expanding the fairway lines, thinning hundreds of trees that had been planted in the 1960s and ‘70s and recapturing an incredible 35,000 square feet of putting surface. Foster also modified Tillinghast’s Great Hazard on the par-5 15th, a vast sandy wasteland that terrorizes second shots in the same vein as the one at Baltusrol Lower’s 17th. The overall results when the course reopened in 2025, and for the efficient price of $6 million, is a drier, faster layout that looks and plays like it might have during the decade it was built.