Design Notebook: An Open-Rota Renovation Vibe Shift

Hello, Fried Egg Golf Club members, and welcome back to Design Notebook, your exclusive update on what’s happening in the world of golf architecture. I’m Garrett Morrison.

It’s been a while. But we’re back now, and you can expect a new DN in your inbox every few weeks for the rest of the year.

Today’s edition features a beefy conversation with up-and-coming British golf architect Sam Cooper about restoring and renovating historic links and heathland courses. But first, let’s delve into some recent industry news:

Chocolate Drops

Has there been a vibe shift on Open-rota renovations? I think most would agree that the 2026 Open Championship was a success, capped by Ryan Fox’s feel-good victory. But it was still an uncomfortable week for host venue Royal Birkdale. The club’s recent course renovation, carried out by Tom Mackenzie of the firm Mackenzie & Ebert, earned a chilly reception — and not just from golf architecture hardos like me.

Scottie Scheffler dealt the first (apparently unintentional) blow during his pre-championship press conference, saying, “It’s so obvious as to which holes had been redone. They look like they’re not even on the same golf course.” R&A chief Mark Darbon then faced — and mostly dodged — tough questions on his stewardship of the Open rota. Finally, on Sunday, Rory McIlroy delivered a blunt verdict: “I feel like with a lot of the changes they made — the greens were raised up, and a lot of the fall-offs and stuff — it didn’t play like a traditional links course.”

This is a new dynamic. Three years ago, when Fried Egg Golf founder Andy Johnson and I criticized Mackenzie’s partner Martin Ebert’s work at Royal Liverpool, we were among the only public voices to do so. Those days are evidently over.

And that means we’re in for a bumpy ride over the next few years. In preparation for the 2027 Open, Ebert made a number of tweaks to the game’s most sacred patch of ground, the Old Course at St. Andrews. (Learn more in this video, released last week by the Links Trust.) Mackenzie & Ebert also recently reconfigured 2028 venue Royal Lytham & St. Annes, relocating the entire par-5 11th hole to make room for a new driving range. Right now, the firm is preparing master plans for potential hosts Portmarnock Golf Club and Muirfield. The suggested changes are rumored to be profound, and I can’t imagine they’ll be more popular than the ones at Royal Birkdale.

The R&A maintains that all recent renovations at Open venues have been “member-driven.” But every time Mackenzie & Ebert gets hired to perform their usual brand of surgery on another classic links course, that line becomes harder to believe. Clearly the R&A exerts a massive amount of influence, explicit or not, on the decision-making of these clubs. I wish it would just wield that power with greater respect for history and site-specificity.

At this week’s Rocket Classic, we’ll get our first look at Tyler Rae’s one-year, $16-million renovation of Detroit Golf Club’s North Course. Pre-tournament press has focused on the club’s efforts to increase the difficulty of the Donald Ross design, so expect deeper bunkers, gnarlier fescue rough, longer par 4s, and tougher pin positions at the edges of enlarged greens. Rae estimates that the course will play “two or three strokes harder,” and he’s probably correct. After all, he converted two former par 5s into long par 4s, reducing the total par from 72 to 70. That’s two strokes right there! (Joe Dey smiles wistfully from the afterlife.)

What’s more interesting to me about Rae’s work, though, is his adherence to Donald Ross’s 1914 plan for DGC’s two courses.

Rae acknowledged in his proposal to the club that “Ross’[s] vision was never fully realized” because the superintendent who led construction, Ernie Way, did not follow directions. “Way broke up the large, flashed-sand, diagonal bunkers seen on the plan into smaller clusters, deviating from Ross’[s] design from the start,” Rae wrote. “We want to bring back the scale, orientation, and visual prowess of these Ross bunkers so they appear more dominant and bold.”

So Rae’s project is best understood not as a restoration of a preexisting course but as a re-implementation of an original plan. That’s not a bad thing, necessarily; all depends on execution, which we can evaluate this week.

The Trump administration is evidently forging ahead with its planned redesign of East Potomac Golf Links. On June 28, President Trump announced on Truth Social that architect Tom Fazio would break ground on September 1 this year. He also delivered the following, objectively untrue assessment of the facility’s 36-hole golf offering: “The grass is largely dead, the greens are virtually unplayable, and the Course is in very poor general condition.”

Two days later, the President was photographed at East Potomac carrying plans that showed a far more ambitious redevelopment of the complex than Interior Secretary Doug Burgum publicized in May.

Meanwhile, the D.C. Preservation League’s lawsuit against the administration remains live, and two key oversight agencies, the National Capital Planning Commission and the Commission on the Fine Arts, have not yet received plans for the renovation. It’s hard to imagine that the project will receive legal approval within the next month. But of course that may not have any bearing on whether it happens.

Mid Ocean Club in Bermuda has hired Gil Hanse to lead a restoration of its C.B. Macdonald golf course. Recently, the club discovered a silent film showing Macdonald himself playing the course — his only design outside of the U.S. — in 1926. Hanse says he will use the footage, along with other archival information, to restore Mid Ocean’s template holes, including the famous “Cape” fifth.

On-site work is scheduled to begin in late 2027.

The Old Barnwell Foundation, the charitable arm of the much-praised golf club outside of Aiken, South Carolina, has purchased Williston Country Club, a nearby public nine-holer. Over the next 18 months, the foundation plans to invest $2 million in the course. Blake Conant, who co-designed the courses at Old Barnwell with Brian Schneider, will develop a master plan and likely begin earthworks next April or May.

This is great news for the increasingly golf-rich Aiken area.

Design Notebook is Presented By

This edition of Design Notebook is presented by the Golf Course Superintendents Association of America.

GCSAA supports more than 21 thousand members worldwide – from superintendents and equipment managers to students and educators. Celebrating its 100th anniversary this year, GCSAA continues to ensure that its members are at the forefront of research, education, innovation, and advocacy through a range of programs and services.

Several new (and newly renovated) golf courses are set to open in the late summer and fall. Here are a few dates I’m keeping an eye on:

July 31: The reopening of Swope Memorial Golf Course, an A.W. Tillinghast-designed municipal course in Kansas City, after a renovation by Todd Clark and Ron Whitten

August 1: The opening of the Matchbox, a short course at Tobacco Road in Sanford, North Carolina

August 6: The opening of Warmouth Sands Golf Course, a public course in Vidalia, Georgia, designed by Mike Young

September 8: The opening of Wild Spring Dunes in East Texas and its first 18-hole course, a Tom Doak design

October 28: The start of preview play at Mike Koprowski’s course at Candyroot Lodge outside of Charlotte, North Carolina

October 30: The start of preview play at Streamsong Bone Valley, a David McLay Kidd design

Where have I been recently? Last week, my colleague Matt Rouches and I attended the U.S. Amateur media day at Merion Golf Club. Matt wrote a quick essay on the East Course for the mothership, and we’ll have more content, including a video, coming soon. My basic take is that Merion has one of the cleverest routings in golf. It’s deeply impressive how much interest, challenge, and variety Hugh Wilson and William Flynn squeezed out of two narrow, rectangular parcels in the Main Line suburbs. But I do lament the club’s continued commitment to narrow fairways and thick rough.

At the beginning of this month, Matt and I went to Garden City, Kansas, to see Buffalo Dunes Golf Course. Over the past several years, this municipal facility has undergone a low-cost transformation led by superintendent Clay Payne and architects Zach Varty and Todd Clark. More to come on Buffalo Dunes, but for now I’ll say this: the peak green fee is $42, and I’m not sure there’s a better course you can play in the entire country for that price.

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Underlined and Starred

“An accepted practice of serious criticism already exists in such art forms as food, sculpture, cinema, and music. Why shouldn’t there be the same tradition in golf course design? Historically, criticism does not mean complaining or condemning. It means to educate an audience and to explore ways of improving upon an art form. The assumption here is that thoughtful, discriminating writing helps make for a better game.” -Bradley S. Klein