Design Notebook: King-Collins Becomes King Collins Dormer

Hello and welcome back to Design Notebook, where we’ve come to respect TGL’s ability to find new, innovative ways to screw up imaginary golf holes.

Today’s DN touches on Trevor Dormer’s recently announced partnership with King-Collins and Jim Urbina’s plans for Olympic Club’s Ocean Course. Let’s get to it.

→ Last Monday, Trevor Dormer, a Canadian golf architect best known for his shaping work with Coore & Crenshaw, announced that he had become the third partner at King Collins Dormer Golf Course Design. (Let’s call them “KCD” from now on, yeah?) As Dormer explained on last Thursday’s episode of the Fried Egg Golf Podcast, he won’t immediately join Tad King and Rob Collins in the field at The Bounty Club, KCD’s new build near Nashville, Tennessee. First, Dormer needs to finish his rebuild of Old Dane Golf Club in Nebraska as well as his shaping commitments at Torch Cay, a Coore & Crenshaw project in the Bahamas. These are busy times for golf architects.

Dormer is one of the best-traveled shapers of the past two decades. In addition to following Coore & Crenshaw to Nova Scotia, the Caribbean, and Japan, he has operated excavators for Jack Nicklaus in Russia, European Golf Design in Bahrain, and Gil Hanse in Thailand. Over the past five years, Dormer has begun to dip his toes into original work, co-designing three new holes at Rosetown Golf Club in Saskatchewan and solo-designing five new holes at Purcell Golf in his hometown of Kimberley, Canada. He started construction at Old Dane last month, and he hopes that the reimagined 12-hole course will be ready for play sometime in 2026.

Like King and Collins, whose Sweetens Cove and Landmand set a new standard for boldness in modern golf course design, Dormer is unafraid of experimentation and eccentricity. Just look at his plan for Old Dane (below). At the same time, as a graduate of Coore & Crenshaw University, he’s a skilled practitioner of low-profile, naturalistic shaping. So while I wouldn’t expect him to temper his new partners’ wildness, I think he’ll help give their ideas a more elegant relationship to the landscape.

Old Dane redesign plan.

Since the bulk of Dormer’s work at Torch Cay and Old Dane will likely wrap up next near, he should be available to assist with KCD’s upcoming projects at 21 Golf Club in South Carolina and 7 Mile Beach in Tasmania.

→ Dormer is part of a cohort of youngish-to-middle-aged golf architects who paid their dues as shapers for the “Big Three” firms (Coore & Crenshaw, Renaissance Golf Design, and Hanse Golf Course Design) and are now getting opportunities to pursue their own ideas. Within the past year, Kyle Franz completed new builds at Cabot Citrus Farms in Florida, Broomsedge in South Carolina, and Luling Sport in Texas. Longtime Coore & Crenshaw associate Jim Craig is building the family-friendly Commons at Sand Valley as well as the second 18-hole course at Rodeo Dunes. Renaissance mainstays Brian Schneider and Blake Conant finished two striking designs at Old Barnwell, a regulation layout and a “kids’ course.” Kye Goalby, who has put in time with both Doak and Hanse, was the lead on-site designer at The Tree Farm and is now heading up a project in Twin Bridges, Montana.

Will these up-and-coming architects consciously attempt to differentiate themselves from their mentors? If so, how? All of them hold Coore, Doak, and Hanse in high regard, yet no doubt they want to avoid being seen as copycats.

We’ve already gotten some indications of how a few members of the Big Three associate tree will try to keep things fresh. Franz has been leaning into aesthetic excess (flashy bunkering, hurly-burly contouring) and exploring George Thomas’s theories of “course-within-a-course” optionality. Schneider and Conant have been mixing naturalism with bold quirk, inspired by off-the-beaten-track Golden Age figures like Walter Travis, Herbert Leeds, and Langford & Moreau.

As for Dormer, he seems excited by Tad King and Rob Collins’s willingness to build features that would feel over-the-top on a Coore & Crenshaw course. “They’re kind of pushing some of my limits,” Dormer told me last week, “and I think it’s actually making me a better constructor of golf and a better designer of golf. And it’s kind of opening up different corridors in my mind for what’s possible.”

→ Here’s a video of Jim Urbina giving a hole-by-hole account of his renovation proposal for the Ocean Course at Olympic Club. The famous San Francisco club has been in refurb mode lately. Gil Hanse’s makeover of its major-hosting Lake Course opened to positive reviews in the fall of 2023, and the green committee asked members to submit feedback on Urbina’s plans, which also contain recommendations for Olympic’s driving range and par-3 Cliffs Course, by last Friday.

It’s hard to tell much from Urbina’s Ocean Course renderings, but his main objectives seem to include:

1. Widening fairways;
2. Repositioning bunkers for strategic—as opposed to penal or purely visual—impact;
3. Restoring the feel, if not the actual features, of Sam Whiting and William Watson’s 1924 design.

The latter will be a tricky task. Olympic Club’s property has changed tremendously over the past 100 years. It was once an open, windswept bluff; it’s now an enclosed swath of parkland. The Ocean Course in particular doesn’t resemble its 1920s self much at all. Its original linksy character has been stamped out by tree planting and clumsy renovation work, and its footprint has been constrained by the addition of a driving range and the Cliffs Course. Today’s Ocean Course is somewhat cramped and awkwardly routed, and there’s not much Jim Urbina can do to rectify that.

Certainly, though, more width and an improved strategic design would be a step in the right direction. Let’s just hope Olympic Club’s membership allows Urbina to prioritize fun factor and historical flavor over difficulty.

Chocolate Drops

The Legacy Club, a Tiger Woods-designed tribute to Shadow Creek, is about to be grassed in Baja. Sounds like there will be a lot of lakes and waterfalls.

Brian Schneider and Blake Conant are currently working on separate renovations in Connecticut: Schneider at Silver Spring in Ridgefield and Conant at Shorehaven in Norwalk. Click the links for recent footage of both projects.

Gil Hanse continues to make improvements at Ridgewood Country Club in New Jersey, an excellent and underrated 27-hole A.W. Tillinghast design.

Have you seen our new Design Disasters Instagram account? My colleagues Brendan Porath and Joseph LaMagna have been killing it there.

Google Earth Before-and-After of the Week

{{content-block-design-notebook-king-collins-dormer-olympic-club-plans-001}}

Nine-hole Spy Ring Golf Club, Tyler Rae’s real-estate-funded revamp of a failed executive course on Long Island, opened last year. The property is oddly shaped and hemmed in by housing, but the new holes seem to enjoy more space than the old ones did.

A Course We Photographed Recently

Northeast Harbor Golf Club (Northeast Harbor, Maine) — nine holes in the meadow designed by Arthur Lockwood in 1919, additional nine holes in the mountains designed by Herbert Strong in 1925, three Strong holes shoddily “restored” by Geoffrey Cornish

{{content-block-design-notebook-king-collins-dormer-olympic-club-plans-002}}

Underlined and Starred

“Americans have a much deeper faith than other peoples in eventual perfection, or at least the moral necessity of constant progress toward perfection. Golf, more than any other game, neatly fits this faith. It has a concept—par—that creates a goal for all and serves to sort out all honest players along a continuum. A handicap system exactly places an individual on that continuum and allows an honest player to monitor his or her progress with numerical exactness. This may be one reason Americans have been so fond of medal play and the quantifiable aspects of the game.” –Richard J. Moss