Design Notebook: The Great Aiken Debate

In this edition of Design Notebook, Andy Johnson takes on a question that many people have been asking him: how does Old Barnwell compare to The Tree Farm? Andy also offers some thoughts on the consequences of very costly golf course restoration and renovations.

Old Barnwell vs. The Tree Farm

A couple of weeks ago at our event, The Hoot, I took my first spin around Old Barnwell, Brian Schneider and Blake Conant’s new design near Aiken, South Carolina. Before I finished the fourth hole, my phone started buzzing with texts asking which course I preferred: Old Barnwell or The Tree Farm?

This question will be frequently discussed among those visiting Aiken on future golf trips. Both courses are in Aiken County, were built between 2021 and 2022, and opened fully in 2023. The similarities don’t stop there: both projects employed architects with similar pedigrees and were initiated by millennial founders. Old Barnwell’s Schneider and Conant have worked on many construction sites for Tom Doak’s Renaissance Golf Design, as has Kye Goalby, the architect at The Tree Farm. (The Tree Farm also benefited from routing assistance from Doak and input from founder Zac Blair.) These shared traits will inevitably intertwine the courses’ stories and make them an irresistible subject of comparison and debate among golf tragics like me.

Old Barnwell and The Tree Farm are both exceptional additions to the American golf scene. Their proximity to Augusta, Georgia, ensures that they will offer unique playing opportunities, especially for those willing to pay a premium during Masters week. This degree of accessibility is one of the best things about private golf in the Augusta area, where many clubs open their doors to the public for one week a year. It’s a costly but achievable dream for many.

Despite their similarities, Old Barnwell and The Tree Farm provide distinct experiences. Both will eventually be featured in full profiles in Club TFE, but first let’s outline what sets the courses apart from one another.

Land

The Tree Farm is situated on an extraordinary property, and its routing does an excellent job highlighting the terrain. Like many top courses, it never moves too much up and down or requires steep climbs. This is partly an indication that the property is well scaled to the game, but it’s also a testament to the design team’s expertise in routing.

A prime example is the 10th and 11th holes, located in a valley at the heart of the site. These consecutive par 4s present vastly different challenges, shaped by the terrain. On the 10th hole, a drive to the left side of the fairway yields a better angle into a green obscured by mounding on the right. To hold the left side, a right-to-left shape off the tee, countering the fairway’s left-to-right slope, is useful. Conversely, the 11th fairway has a right-to-left tilt, demanding control from a sidehill lie into a green perched on a ridge.

Behind the 11th hole at The Tree Farm

These holes represent how The Tree Farm’s routing evolved during the design process. In initial plans, many of the holes traversed the property’s ridges. Now they play along the sides of those ridges, resulting in a less strenuous walk and more varied lies and shots. The hard work that goes into finding 18 great holes is abundantly evident at The Tree Farm.

Greens

Old Barnwell’s land is by no means bad; it’s just not quite as consistently dramatic as The Tree Farm’s. In a way, this freed up Brian Schneider and Blake Conant to be bold in their approach to built features. Whereas The Tree Farm’s greens and bunkers are subtle and elegant, Old Barnwell’s are abrupt and immediately striking. Schneider and Conant lean on protruding features, recalling the most audacious courses of Walter Travis and C.B. Macdonald, where trench-like bunkers and prominent vertical shapes like berms and mounds are commonplace. This style aligns well with Old Barnwell’s more aggressive green contouring, as the protrusions within the greens echo the surrounding features.

Old Barnwell’s greens will likely ruffle the feathers of those who favor “fair” golf. What brought this home to me was watching a friend get punched in the face on the second hole: after driving the green, he faced a tricky downhill, downwind putt that ended up off the green, leading to a bogey.

These severe greens make a good pairing with the course’s generous width. The golf analytics crowd often associates wide fairways with a lack of challenge, but when matched with greens like Old Barnwell’s, width is exactly what makes a design compelling to me. When the conditions are firm and fast, every hole requires you to consider the ideal approach angle. If you find the strategically advantageous part of the fairway, the contours in the greens will help you; if you don’t, they’ll work against you and make attacking pins exceedingly difficult.

Take the par-5 12th: the right side of the wide fairway falls off and is tough to hold, but it offers the only angle to hit it close to a left pin. Conversely, the safer left side of the fairway makes reaching the green in two strokes a challenge, often leading to a difficult chip or putt. This is what I mean when I say “width with consequences.”

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This dynamic of advantageous versus disadvantageous fairway positions is not immediately apparent and may initially turn off some players. However, for those with a discerning eye and a passion for golf, this is exactly what a great course does: it causes you to play defense from seemingly adequate positions.

Verdict

I expect that one-time visitors will generally favor The Tree Farm, with its elegant and beautiful property making it immediately recognizable as a world-class course. On the other hand, Old Barnwell’s more challenging features may initially intimidate and frustrate first-timers.

With each round, however, Old Barnwell’s design reveals more and more of itself. You’ll find yourself looking at a 60-yard-wide fairway and knowing you need to find a specific 20-yard-wide section in order to avoid facing an impossible shot from a perfect lie. So for someone who relishes greens that demand precision and strategic thinking, Old Barnwell probably edges out The Tree Farm for repeat play. If given 10 rounds, I’d play more at Old Barnwell. If someone could play only one round at either, though, I might push them toward The Tree Farm, as I don’t believe a single loop around Old Barnwell would be enough to appreciate the course properly. -Andy Johnson

The downsides of top-dollar golf course renovations

On an episode of the Fried Egg Golf Podcast last week, architect Bruce Hepner criticized trend of costly golf course restorations and renovations. He referred to these projects as “Instagram architecture” and argued that even the historically driven ones often sacrifice the character of old courses. When you replace mature turf and bunkers with modern monostands and liners, Hepner suggested, you lose some substance. I can’t help but agree. One of the things I worry most about when a club embarks on an ambitious master plan is that the course will come out feeling brand new.

Another factor that golf clubs should consider more closely when weighing a pricey renovation is the structure of the funding. Where is the money coming from? Sometimes it’s assessments; other times, revenue from increased outside play; often, a hike in guest fees. The latter, unsurprisingly, is my least favorite method of paying for big projects.

I am not a member of a club right now, but my main reason for joining one would be to play with people I like and occasionally invite friends. It’s one of the few things I miss about my life before I started Fried Egg Golf: getting together with buddies at my club for some casual golf. But these days, more and more golf clubs are increasing daily fees in order to cover renovation costs. To me, this substantially reduces the appeal of a membership. I don’t want to tell clubs how to spend their money, but I raise an eyebrow when guest fees exceed $200 at a place where members already pay enormous amounts in initiation, assessment, and annual fees. I know of a few clubs that now charge over $300 per round, pushing the cost for a member hosting three guests to nearly $2,000 after caddie fees—all in pursuit of perfect conditions and, in some cases, championship golf. This approach, in my view, doesn’t benefit golf, regardless of members’ ability to afford it.

This week, I played at an exclusive, highly regarded club in San Francisco. This club has the means to carry out any type of renovation, yet it has chosen instead to do small projects that preserve the course’s original ethos and feel while avoiding financial strain on the membership. When you drive in the gate, everything feels old: the bunkers are worn and the turf has a beautiful mishmash of hues. Is it perfect? No—but should perfection be the goal of golf course stewardship when golf itself is such an imperfect game?

Oh yeah, and the guest fees are still under $100. -AJ

A course we photographed recently

Congressional Country Club (Blue)—designed by Devereux Emmet and Alfred Tull in 1924; repeatedly monkeyed with by Robert Trent Jones, Rees Jones, and other architects between 1957 and 2010; renovated by Andrew Green in 2021

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Quotable

“There are many bad golf courses made in an attempt to eliminate the element of luck—a mistake, surely. Luck is the zest of life, as well as golf.

“There are two schools of thought in golf; the penal school and the strategic school. The penal school, in their well intentioned effort to eliminate luck, simply succeed in accentuating it, and in constructing golf courses so dull and uninteresting and devoid of suspense and thrills that no one wishes to play them. The strategic school, on the other hand, are the small minority of golfers who subscribe to the doctrine of Mr. John L. Low ‘that no bunker is unfair, wherever it is placed’—and ‘that an error of judgment, to say the least of it, has always been perpetrated if a ball is trapped by a hazard.’ They consider that the indifferent player should be allowed enough rope to hang himself and that generally the punishment for a bad shot should not be an immediate one, but should be postponed so that the player is in a bad strategic position for attacking the green. In other words, there should be at least one, if not more, broad roads that lead to destruction and a narrow and hazardous road that leads to salvation.

“What does it matter if the poor player can putt all the way from tee to green, provided that he has to zigzag so frequently that he takes six or seven putts to reach it?” –Alister MacKenzie