King Collins Dormer

Rob Collins is a native of Chattanooga, Tennessee. He received a B.A. in Art History from the University of the South, Sewanee, in 1997, before achieving a graduate degree in Landscape Architecture from Mississippi State University in 2005. For the latter, he wrote his thesis on the environmental impact of golf architecture and construction. He soon became an associate of Gary Player Design.

Tad King is a native of Marietta, Georgia, and attended the University of Georgia. He got his start in the golf industry in 1986, before meeting Rob Collins for the first time in 2006 on a shared Gary Player Design, Twin Eagles, in Florida. Tad specializes in bringing conceptual designs to reality through complex engineering and construction. 

The two architects formed King Collins Design in July 2010. Soon after they formalized their partnership, Bob Thomas Jr., the owner of a rural Tennessee municipal course near Collins’ alma mater Sewanee, hired the pair to renovate his course in 2011. The result, in 2014, was Sweetens Cove, an acclaimed design which has since developed a cult following.

King Collins’ next major commissions came towards the end of the decade, just as their breakthrough design at Sweetens secured its financial future with investment from a host of celebrities and athletes in 2019. South of New York’s Catskill Mountains, they completed nine holes at Inness (2021). In the same year, near downtown Memphis, they renovated nine holes at Overton Park. King Collins received its first chance to create a full 18-hole layout on rolling farmland in northeastern Nebraska at Landmand Golf Club in 2022. They followed that audacious design with another bold creation in 2023 at the Crossroads at Palmetto Bluff, a 60-acre reversible golf course. In the southern suburbs of Lubbock, Texas, King Collins added another 18-hole course to their portfolio at Red Feather Golf & Social Club (2023).

In late 2024, King Collins Design announced that Canadian architect Trevor Dormer, with over a decade of experience working with Bill Coore & Ben Crenshaw, would join the firm as a named architect. Thus, King Collins Dormer was created. Their future projects together include Bounty Club, just north of Nashville, and a second course at 7 Mile Beach, Tasmania.