Amata Spring Country Club

Amata Spring can be considered the Shadow Creek or Wynn Golf Club of Thailand, though instead of manufacturing valleys, creeks and foothills out of a flat desert floor the base material here was a scant circle of land surrounding a large industrial lake. The reservoir level was drained 10 meters to give architects Lee Schmidt and Brian Curley room to work, and fill was used to build up enough land to support holes strung around the centralized water that comes into play on eight holes. The course is a garden enclave in the middle of a densely populated city 35 miles southeast of Bangkok, completely inoculated from the surrounding urbanization, and features a floating island green (players are ferried to it in a boat) and an 18th hole that finishes next to a Wynn-like cascading waterfall.