Chocolate Drops: Kings Collins Dormer Presents a Plan for Royal Dornoch

This week’s Chocolate Drops arrive a day late thanks to an internet outage in the suburbs east of Portland, Oregon. Any complaints? Send them to me, by all means, but make sure to CC Ziply Fiber. Onward…

→ In April, Royal Dornoch Golf Club announced that it had hired King Collins Dormer — the U.S. firm led by Tad King, Rob Collins, and Trev Dormer — to create a master plan for a property now partly occupied by the club’s Struie Course. Last Tuesday, Collins and Dormer presented their ideas to the membership. Here’s a video of that presentation…

… along with the plan itself… 

… and some renderings of potential holes by Harris Kalinka:

{{gallery-KCD-Royal-Dornoch-Plan}}

Basically, KCD is proposing to renovate (and reroute portions of) the Struie Course, create an 18-hole New Course on land recently purchased by the club, and build an array of amenities, including two putting courses, a double-ended driving range, a members-only practice area, an 18-hole par-3 course, and a four-hole par-3 “loop.” It’s a complex, ambitious plan — one that, as Collins emphasized several times, is subject to revision depending on member requests and in-the-field discoveries.

Dormer, who joined the firm last year, took the lead in routing the New Course, and given his background as an associate for Coore & Crenshaw, I’m sure he will spend a good deal of time on site. He’s a real talent, and I’m excited to see how he shapes KCD’s work, both literally and figuratively.

→ Great news for the mostly anemic public golf scene in Charlotte, North Carolina: Mike Koprowski, one of the architects behind Broomsedge, will design a new public course called Downbonnie in the sandhills outside the city. Via Instagram, the ownership group wrote, “For too long, the Charlotte metro has lacked a world-class, architecturally significant public course, and the recent golf boom in the region has been almost exclusively within the private and resort space. We’re working to change this!” Hell yeah.

→ Robert Trent Jones Jr.’s firm is carving a course out of some rocky (perhaps volcanic?) land near Reykjavik, Iceland.

→ OCM shared an intriguing before-and-after of its ongoing work at The Stanwich Club in Connecticut.