Chocolate Drops: Gil Hanse Presents a Plan for Sunningdale

Howdy, members. Here are some golf architecture stories that have my attention this week:

→ Last year, Sunningdale Golf Club in Ascot, England, announced that it had hired Gil Hanse to prepare master plans for renovations of the club’s two courses. Two weeks ago, Hanse met with members to discuss his proposals for the Old (Willie Park, Jr., 1901) and New (Harry Colt, 1922) courses, respectively. I reviewed these plans as well as recordings of Hanse’s presentations, and I came away excited about the potential of both projects. A few observations:

• The core of Hanse’s work will be tree removal, fairway expansions, and green expansions. Like most courses built in the early 20th century, the Old and New at Sunningdale have lost a great deal of width and scale over the years. Hanse is pushing to recapture the dimensions that the courses possessed in their early years. He's also keen to restore large amounts of native heath, which has given way to pine trees over the years.

• Hanse hopes to build many new tee boxes, allowing the courses to play both longer from the back tees and shorter from the front tees. 
• Hanse recommends keeping the bones of Sunningdale Old almost entirely intact. The only hole where he proposes a significant redesign is the ninth, a very short par 4. Hanse’s concept introduces a bit more strategic oomph.

• Hanse’s plan for Sunningdale New is far more ambitious, involving dramatic tree removal and design changes. Since the New has been monkeyed with more over the years than the Old, Hanse believes that recapturing the full excellence of Harry Colt’s original design will require some bold moves.
• In that spirit, Hanse suggests a wholesale reimagining of the ninth hole, turning a 424-yard par 4 into a 565-yard par 5. One advantage of this plan would be that the tee boxes on the famous par-3 10th hole could be restored to their original position.

• Hanse has also looked into flipping the first and 18th hole corridors on the New back to their 1920s configuration, but this change is unlikely to be implemented because of concerns about a shared property line with a neighboring mansion.

All in all, exciting stuff. Alongside the ongoing work at St. George’s Hill Golf Club and The Addington Golf Club (by Renaissance Golf Design and Clayton, DeVries & Pont, respectively), Hanse’s proposals for Sunningdale bode well for the future of golf architecture in the heathland region.

→ Restoration specialist Jim Nagle has started his own email newsletter (welcome to the club!) called The Press Room. The first edition, published last week, contained the news that Nagle is preparing a master plan for The Country Club of Harrisburg, a William Flynn design in the state capital of Pennsylvania.

→ After a years-long, piecemeal, community-driven renovation, Buffalo Dunes Golf Course in Garden City, Kansas, has 18 new greens in play. For more on this outstanding municipal project, check out my interview from last year with superintendent Clay Payne.

→ I’m deep into Oakmont Country Club lore at the moment. Tuesday’s episode of the Designing Golf podcast will be all about the course, and we’ll have a full course profile for you later this week. In the meantime, I’ll recommend two articles that I encountered during my research: “Mission: Unpopular,” a 2002 Golf Digest feature on the club’s controversial, influential tree-removal program; and “The Lost Hole of Oakmont,” a 2021 piece by Steve Schlossman on recent revelations about the design history of the 16th hole.