This article is part of our International Homes special section, which takes a look at homes and golf, from planned communities and sustainability to course designers and where they live.
The homes of great golf course designers are revered by those who know them the same way the houses of great artists, writers and political leaders are visited and admired.
In the last decade, the Chicago home of Charles Blair Macdonald, the architect who introduced the idea of template holes — with names like Punchbowl and Alps — to America and designed some of the most significant early golf clubs, has been sold twice, with his ownership mentioned both times.
Ballyshear, as the estate was called, was built in 1897 near the exclusive Chicago Golf Club, which he designed. Mr. Macdonald and his wife lived there until 1900, when they moved to Long Island, the site of perhaps his greatest design, the National Golf Links of America.
In Southhampton, N.Y., Mr. Macdonald built another estate and also named it Ballyshear, but it is famous for a more recent owner: Michael Bloomberg, the former New York City mayor who suspended his campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination this week.
Likewise, Donald Ross’s home has been preserved at the Pinehurst resort in North Carolina, where he designed four of the nine courses. His home, called Dornoch Cottage, sits between the third and fifth greens at Pinehurst No. 2, a frequent United States Open site.
Recently Pinehurst No. 4 was restored by Gil Hanse, who lived in Mr. Ross’s house while he was there.
Will the homes of today’s versions of Mr. Macdonald and Mr. Ross tell a story the way their Long Island estate and Carolina cottage do? It is possible, as the world is going through another golden age of golf architecture that could surpass what these early 20th-century legends did.
Here is a look inside the homes of three of the greatest golf course architects today — Bill Coore, Mr. Hanse and Michael Hurdzan. (Another of the great architects working today, Tom Doak, was not available.)
Scottsdale Simplicity
Mr. Coore teamed with Ben Crenshaw in 1986 to start a course design firm, Coore & Crenshaw. Mr. Coore had worked with Pete Dye, who created TPC Sawgrass, before going out on his own, while Mr. Crenshaw, the 1984 and 1995 Masters champion, won 19 PGA Tour events.
Although they are native Texans, Mr. Coore has lived in Scottsdale, Ariz., for more than two decades. He moved there when he met his wife, Sue Hershkowitz-Coore. But the couple do not live on a golf course — Mr. Coore has never lived on a course.
“In my case I spend so much time physically on golf sites that I get my quota, so to speak, of experiencing golf sites without living on one,” he said. His house is close to Whisper Rock, a favorite club of touring pros like Phil Mickelson (who designed one of its courses), Geoff Ogilvy and Paul Casey.
But the design of Mr. Coore’s home, which sits on about an acre and a half, evokes his architectural philosophy of routing a course through the land so it looks as if it has always been there.
“It’s a piece of property that we found interesting,” he said. “It’s an old adobe house. It looks like it’s been there for many years. The other part is stucco and wood. The house is nestled between some boulders and cacti.”
And he played down its size: “It was just a comfortable spot we found to live near some friends.”
Coore & Crenshaw courses — like the private clubs Friar’s Head on Long Island, Sand Hills in Nebraska, and Old Sandwich in Massachusetts or public ones at Bandon Dunes, Cabot Links and Streamsong — are instantly recognizable. They select amazing pieces of property, move only a little earth and create a course of grass and occasional sea. Their courses are tests of the mind as much as the swing.
Many of the courses have cabins and homes where members and visitors stay when they play. “We try to study the sites thoroughly to understand what they would give in the way of interesting features to golf,” Mr. Coore said, “but in the process of studying the sites you also see the adjacent properties.”
At Old Sandwich, for example, a group of rustic cottages are built into a wooded hillside near the driving range. But once you walk down to the clubhouse and over a bridge to the first tee, you never see a home or anything else to interrupt your view of the course.
A Busman’s Holiday
When the best players in the world tee it up at the 120th United States Open at Winged Foot’s West Course in June, they will be playing a course that has hosted the national championship six times. But the A.W. Tillinghast masterpiece will be different from the one that hosted the 2006 U.S. Open — made memorable when Mr. Mickelson lost the tournament on the 18th hole with a drive so wild that it bounced off a hospitality tent.
In 2017, Mr. Hanse completed a restoration of the West Course, in Marmaroneck, N.Y., after a 2014 restoration of the East Course, also designed by Mr. Tillinghast. Mr. Hanse has restored other classic U.S. Open sites like Merion Golf Club outside Philadelphia, The Country Club in Brookline, Mass., and Los Angeles Country Club.
“Our ethos with these old historical places is put back what the old dead guys built,” he said. “It’s been our ethos with our home.”
He and his wife, Tracey, live outside of Philadelphia in an Amish barn, built into a hill in 1831. It has 22-inch-thick stone walls, exposed beams and four stories. The couple has been restoring it for the past 15 years.
The first floor still has the original horse stalls and dirt floor. The family uses the second floor mainly for storage and lives on the top two floors. “There’s a big platform over the living room that used to feed a pipe for the animals,” Mr. Hanse said. Now it is an interesting architectural feature.
“The only thing my wife doesn’t like about it is it’s been a little bit dark,” he said. “I’ve been loath to punch windows in the walls for fear of disrupting them.”
Mr. Hanse said his office on the top floor has wide wood floors made from lumber milled from the Boston Golf Club, which he designed, and floor-to-ceiling bookcases filled with his extensive golf library. There are also drafting tables and computers.
“There’s a little pocket window that can slide and looks down into the family room,” he said. “I used to open it and yell down at my kids when they were young and making too much noise.”
The Technician and His Lab
Dr. Hurdzan, a retired Army Special Forces colonel, has tested his theories of golf architecture far and wide. His breakthrough design was a pair of courses commissioned by the creators of the board game Trivial Pursuit: Devil’s Pulpit and Devil’s Paintbrush, named the best new courses in Canada in 1990 and 1992.
“That opened up the world to us,” Dr. Hurdzan said. The 11th hole at Pulpit is three holes in one, as there are variations.
He achieved international fame — or infamy — when Erin Hills in Wisconsin hosted the 2017 U.S. Open. The course was officially opened in 1999, and had soft greens, wide fairways and fescue to trap errant shots. The winning score was 16 under par, which tied for the lowest winning score ever at a U.S. Open. Criticism followed.
Yet it put Dr. Hurdzan in the pantheon of architects who have created a U.S. Open course and finally brought him name recognition. “The joke was I was Dr. Who,” he said.
“People would play a great course and come back and say, Who designed this? They’d say, Dr. Hurdzan. And the people would say, Dr. who? Erin Hills made us A-listers.”
Dr. Hurdzan’s choice of a home in Columbus, Ohio, was not about testing new design features but practicality and convenience: He did not want to be more than two miles from his office and he wanted his only son to go to a good public school in the Upper Arlington neighborhood.
Dr. Hurdzan grew up in a small rural area, and he said he struggled when he first got to Ohio State University. “The whole emphasis was the school district for my son, Chris,” he said.
There was a third criteria: enough land to plant a garden where he could test out his ideas. On a street with spacious mansions that have tennis courts and pools in the backyards, Dr. Hurdzan’s 3,200-square-foot house, built in 1985, resembles a ski chalet from the front but has a homey feel inside. The living room can fit 30 people, and has a double fireplace.
A half wedge away is Chris’s home, a converted barn where he lives with his wife, Sara, and their 15-month-old.
“I wanted the house to be really into the environment,” Dr. Hurdzan said. “This house, even though it’s in the middle of Columbus, we have windows that are floor to ceiling on all four sides. It’s light and airy, and at reasonable times we open the doors, let the air flow in.”
It is also a test kitchen of sorts for his design ideas. He planted a patchwork quilt of five grass specimens.
“I wanted to experiment with low maintenance rough using fine fescues,” he said of the grass that was a feature of Erin Hills during the U.S. Open. “I wanted to see how difficult it is to grow these things. My wife is not impressed. She said the place looks like a checkerboard.”
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