Chocolate Drops: North Berwick Moves On to Gil Hanse

→ On Thursday, November 13, Fried Egg Golf obtained an email to members from North Berwick Golf Club in East Lothian, Scotland, announcing that the club had hired U.S.-based designer Gil Hanse as its consulting architect.

"Beginning in 2026, Gil will work closely with us to develop a Master Plan for the West Links, ensuring its heritage is preserved while preparing for the future."

North Berwick's West Links is a revered course, home to the much-imitated "Redan" par 3 and "Pit" par 4, along with many other unique holes. Golf architect and longtime North Berwick member James Duncan mused on the magic of the West Links in this Fried Egg Golf video.

More from the club's announcement:

"Gil's strength lies in honoring the heritage of the course, restoring key features, while remaining sensitive to modern play. This thoughtful approach ensures the West Links retains its character while evolving for the future. Continuity and consistency will come through minor refinements, with no major changes anticipated. A critical priority, however, is addressing coastal erosion through robust contingencies and protective measures to mitigate future risks from the advancing sea."

The email also mentions that Hanse's hiring came after "a rigorous selection process, including on-course evaluations and consultations with other leading architects."

For the past few years, North Berwick has employed Clyde Johnson, a UK-based architect and Tom Doak associate, to assist with projects like the restoration of the front-left bunker on the Redan hole. Johnson is a terrific young talent, and from a personal standpoint, I feel bad for him. His recent work on the West Links has been very well received.

Philosophically, the move from Johnson to Hanse is more or less lateral. Both are historically minded architects. Plus, as the portion of the email that I bolded indicates, Hanse's alterations to the course are expected to be, like Johnson's, careful and subtle.

In terms of public relations, however, Hanse is obviously a bigger name. He also commands higher fees, in general.

{{inline-course}}

This decision by North Berwick might be an indicator of a broader sea change in British and Irish golf. Over the last several years, visitor rates at top links clubs, even at those that do not host Open Championships, have skyrocketed. Golf tourism in Great Britain and Ireland has become a big, lucrative business. Many clubs have more money to spend than they ever have, and some have chosen to invest a portion of that windfall back into their courses. Royal Dornoch Golf Club's decision to roll with King Collins Dormer's out-of-the-box plan to overhaul its Struie Course is an example of this trend.

But I'm skeptical that more expensive, ambitious architecture will improve British and Irish links courses. Some places don't really need to change. So I hope Hanse uses a light touch at North Berwick. 

→ Jason Bruno (aka "Links Nation") caused a bit of a stir on X last week when he posted some fresh shots of Harbour Town Golf Links, which recently reopened after a historical renovation by Love Golf Design. The controversy revolved around a pair of revetted green-side bunkers seen in one photo.

Some commenters complained that Harbour Town architect Pete Dye never built revetted bunkers. (He did — at Harbour Town. They just didn't last very long because the sod stacks collapsed. Eventually Dye replaced the revetting with turfed-over walls, which became a mainstay of his later designs.) Others objected to the use of artificial materials in the sod stacks.

For the most part, though, the critics just didn't like the look of the bunkers. Which is fair, but we should probably wait until the stack-sod walls have had a chance to wear in before rendering a final judgment.

In an April 2025 edition of Design Notebook, Scot Sherman, lead designer at Love Golf Design, gave me some insight into the thinking and technical process behind this work:

Scot: We’re working on some details that really speak to what Pete did originally that didn’t last real long. He did some sod-stacking to several bunkers out there, and from the pictures and from recollections of others, some of that stacking was with Bahia and or St. Augustine grass, and it didn’t last long. And natural sod-stacking usually has to be replaced every three or four or five years, and [Harbour Town] just didn’t do it and [eventually] just grassed the faces. So again, in a tip of the cap to [Dye], we’re going to go ahead and do some of these that were originally stacked, but we’re going to do it in a little bit of a modern context. We think we could do something that’ll last a little longer. We have an artificial product, and we’re going to alternate artificial stacking with natural sod. We really don’t want it to look artificial, but we also want there to be hints of the sod-stacking. So we’re going to do a row of the artificial, a row of Celebration [Bermudagrass] sod, a row of the artificial, a row of the Celebration, and it’ll fuzz a little bit, and you’ll be able to discern the stacking.

Garrett: So the outcome of this sod-stacking process — will it look like a revetted bunker, like you would see in Scotland?

From the email: It’ll have a little bit different appearance. It won’t be that clean revetment like you’re used to seeing, and nor was Pete’s original sod-stacking. It’s going to be a little fuzzier, a little more ragged.Between ourselves and the owner and the old pictures that we have from the late 60s — the original tournament there that Mr. Palmer won — we’re going to put some of them back. I don’t know that we’re putting all of the ones we know about back, but some of that’s going to be a field decision. For example, there were a couple [sod-stacked bunkers] behind No. 9 green. Those are going to go back for sure. We’re putting back the dreaded deep pot bunker left of 14 green.

"Restoring" a golf course always involves judgment calls like this one. If you want to pay tribute to Dye's vision, do you recapture the course that existed on opening day, including the parts that didn't prove sustainable because of some technical deficit? Or do you honor the architectural refinements of the ensuing years, which, in Harbour Town's case, were overseen by the original architect and a long-tenured, well-respected construction company? 

Or, hidden option C, do you simply trust your own taste and go with the option you like best?

I'll admit I’m a skeptic of the new/old revetted bunkers at Harbour Town — not because they dishonor Pete Dye’s legacy, but because they don't look all that great to me. I'm not too worked up about it, though, because, in the end, it’s a fairly minor aesthetic issue. 

→ Calumet Country Club — a Donald Ross design in Homewood, Illinois (just south of Chicago) — has closed permanently, according to W&E Ventures, the depressingly named company that owns the property. Read a Patch article on this development here.

W&E, which purchased Calumet in 2020, cited an effort "to prevent vagrancy and security issues" as its rationale for shutting down "all golf course operations" and removing "all infrastructure throughout the property."

You know what else might have helped make the golf course safer? Reopening and restaffing it.

Anyway, Calumet has been struggling for a while, but it was an important fixture in the Chicago golf scene — the former home club of Fried Egg founder Andy Johnson, in fact — and I'm sad to see it go. Andy wrote movingly about his history with the course for our newsletter.

{{inline-article}}

→ Social roundup:

• The Manitou Club has a routing by architect Brian Schneider and a site with good soil and rolling topography in Chippewa County, Wisconsin. All it needs now is a group of investors and founding members to provide $2-3 million in funding. Schneider tells me that this project would be “an example of true minimalism in golf course architecture and development.” Color me intrigued.
• In other Schneider news, he has wrapped up this season’s restoration work at Donald Ross’s Woodhill Country Club in Minnesota.
• Coore & Crenshaw visited First Tee Midland in Texas for a “planning session to add three holes to the original six we built.” The construction team will be led by Rodney Cole and Dan Proctor. Forgive my ignorance, but I had no idea there was a six-hole Coore & Crenshaw public golf course in Midland!
• Clayton, DeVries & Pont offered a glimpse of Mike Clayton and Lukas Michel’s new six-green private-estate course in Central Victoria.
• This past weekend, Clayton did final checks of his and Mike DeVries’s soon-to-open course at 7 Mile Beach.
• Tyler Rae posted some updated photos of his recently unveiled new build at Old Sawmill Golf Club in Ridgeville, South Carolina.
• OCM Golf gave some fresh insights into their course-within-a-course concept at the National Golf Club’s Long Island location outside of Melbourne, Australia.
• Jim Nagle continues his restoration work at Dick Wilson’s NCR Country Club in Dayton, Ohio, as winter closes in.
• Here’s a view of Proper Golf’s new drivable par-4 16th hole at the Patterson Club in Connecticut.
• Proper Golf’s Nicklaus Mills muses on the “three archetypes of golf architects.”‍
• As the news broke that Clyde Johnson had been replaced by Gil Hanse as consulting architect at North Berwick Golf Club, Johnson reflected on his role in guiding North Berwick on its “journey toward restoration.”