BEST RENOVATION
How Interlachen Country Club reclaimed its fascinating Donald Ross greens and earned Best Renovation honors

Architecturally, the work completed at Interlachen, a Donald Ross design outside Minneapolis, is a restoration-renovation hybrid. Designer Andrew Green used Ross’ hole-by-hole blueprints from 1919 to guide the comprehensive redesign that touched every aspect of the property, restoring bunkers and putting-surface dimensions as closely as possible to what was first drawn. The green perimeter and revived bunkers at the stunning par-3 fifth, for instance, are faithful to what Ross envisioned, and Green’s shaping of the swale and crest of the putting surface gives life to what is one of the most fascinating greens Ross designed.

Brad Rempel

Brad Rempel

Brad Rempel

Brad Rempel
The team also used historical resources including photographs and old film to ascertain what was actually built that might not have not been presented on blueprints. Elsewhere, Green made alterations to better meet the demands of modern golfers and tournament play. These include a number of newly conceived or shifted greens, including the first, third, eighth, 13th and 16th. The green at the par-4 10th was actually moved 50 yards beyond its former location atop a newly extended embankment of land. The work, including the culmination of years’ worth of tree removal, has opened the landscape to better highlight Interlachen’s gorgeous natural ground movements, enabling gathering points like the ridges collecting the second and seventh greens (and subsequent tees) and the 12th green on the south section of the property, to become focal points even from a distance.
Since 2003, Interlachen, site of Bobby Jones’ 1930 U.S. Open victory, had slowly slipped in the Golf Digest rankings from 36th to 84th, losing some of its luster as one of the country’s great historic courses. Green’s ability to sharpen Ross’ architecture and highlight the best aspects of the land has the potential to reverse that trend.
This is Green's first Best Renovation award to go with his 2021 Best Transformation award for Congressional's Blue Course.
Take a closer look at the new-look Interlachen with the drone footage below, shared by the club's content team:

When Bobby Jones won the 1930 U.S. Open at Interlachen (completing the second leg of what would become the game’s first Grand Slam), fellow competitor Gene Sarazen insisted the course was tougher than everything but Oakmont. In the decades that followed a series of architects including Robert Trent Jones, Geoffrey Cornish and Brian Silva worked to keep Interlachen’s edge, but nothing could staunch the march of time. Enter Andrew Green in 2023, who was given the resources to strip back the layers and rebuild the course based on the blueprints Donald Ross developed in 1922 when he remodeled the course.
SECOND PLACE
OCEAN FOREST GOLF CLUB
Rees Jones designed Ocean Forest to considerable praise, finishing second in the 1996 Best New Private Course category. Located on the northern tip of the exclusive Sea Island, it’s an evocative design that slinks through a lowcountry setting of sea pines and wetlands with little interference from homes—the sense of isolation is complete. Though respected and highly ranked (it charted as high as No. 75 in America’s 100 Greatest Courses ranking and currently sits at No. 162), the club realized it was time for a design upgrade.
One of architect Beau Welling’s goals was to make the course more playable for members without sacrificing the high-level skill demands evidenced during the 2001 Walker Cup. He did that by lowering greens that tended to sit up high and expanding the putting surfaces to give golfers more space to play to, though to score you must be able to place approaches in the right quadrants. He also reduced the number of bunkers, but those he added have flashed faces to be more visible. The other goal was to better highlight one of the most unique coastal settings on the eastern seaboard. The site borders the Atlantic Ocean and the Hampton River inlet, with holes five, 13, 17 and 18 set directly on the shorelines. By removing excess trees and underbrush from the interior of the course, water views are now possible from deep inside the property. Formerly, the inland holes were akin to a parkland course, with traditional Bermuda roughs and Jones’ soft, upholstered bunkers. To infuse the design with a stronger seaside theme, Welling stripped away the grass and pine straw in out-of-play areas to expose the native sand, creating contrasting beach-like swaths that outline fairways and greens. In other words, the ocean has been brought into the forest.

Ocean Forest occupies one of the premier oceanside settings on the East Coast. Originally designed by Rees Jones, the fairways laterally traverse the site’s interior pines, skirting marshes and breaking out in memorable moments to the shore of the broad Hampton River inlet before finishing along the Atlantic Ocean at 17 and 18.
THIRD PLACE
OMNI LA COSTA RESORT & SPA (NORTH)
Formerly known as the Champions Course at this 36-hole resort north of San Diego, the North Course underwent a major $20-million renovation to prepare for becoming the home for the NCAA Division 1 Men’s and Women’s championships through at least 2028.
Reviving the 1965 Dick Wilson design (formerly the site of the PGA Tour’s Tournament of Champions and the WGC Match Play Championship in 1999) for collegiate match play was the organizing principle for Gil Hanse and Jim Wagner. The primary thrust was to inject it with more temptation and strategic risk, in part by designing new greens where the line between a good shot and a miss into bunkers or chipping depressions is razor thin. They also tweaked yardages, adding extra length and introducing half-par holes like the par-4 11th and 15th, both around 350 yards, which will induce collegiate players to take shots at the greens with driver. The tone of the architecture is also a throwback, with the bunkers and design elements roughed up to look more aged along with naturalized waterways and native-grass areas.

Other Nominees

Atlanta Country Club hosted the inaugural Tournament Players Championship in 1974 and the PGA Tour’s Atlanta stop from 1967 to 1996, and was among Golf Digest’s Second 100 Greatest courses until it fell out of the ranking in 2023. We’ll see if Beau Welling’s remodel propels it back into the top 200.

Brantford Golf & Country Club
Brantford, ON, Canada











Situated on a tight, triangularly shaped property about a mile from the Atlantic Ocean in Hobe Sound, Fla., Loblolly is a challenging Pete and P.B. Dye design. Golf course builder Jim Urbina, who worked for Dye in the 1980s, completed a full refurbishing of the course in 2023, painstakingly restoring the craft and details of the original design that had faded through the years.






Situated within a mecca of great golf courses, Tamarack Country Club stands out as one of the finest. Built by Charles Banks in 1929, the course includes many template holes that were the trademark of Banks’ mentors, Seth Raynor and C.B Macdonald, and a few great original holes on the back nine. The course is memorable for its massive scale throughout the property, often allowing players to recover from wayward misses. A historical restoration by Brian Schneider, completed in 2023, focused on continued tree removal, reestablishing old fairway parameters, tying the green entrances into the approaches and returning the bunkering shapes and schemes to what was first developed by Banks but later modified through the decades.






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