Design Notebook: An Inside Look at Jackson Kahn’s Redesign of North Ranch

Hello and welcome back to Design Notebook, where we’d like to remind you that it’s now July, aka Links Season. Sure, the Irish Open has been moved to September and the Scottish Open doesn’t take place until next week, but tradition is tradition. The start of July means the start of #LinksSZN. Celebrate however you see fit.

In this week’s DN, Cameron Hurdus explores an intriguing Jackson Kahn project in Southern California, and Garrett Morrison offers some thoughts on the news that Chambers Bay is mulling an overture from LIV Golf. Let’s dig in.

An Under-the-Radar Redesign at North Ranch Country Club

By Cameron Hurdus

Earlier this year, Jackson Kahn Golf Design (made up of architects Tim Jackson and David Kahn) began a redesign of the Valley and Oak nines at North Ranch Country Club in Westlake Village, California—about an hour west of Los Angeles.

The club’s property has a long and varied history; it was part of one of the first Mexican land grants in 1795, was purchased by William Randolph Hearst in 1925, and then again by Prudential Insurance and the Hawaiian Steamship Company in 1962. It even served as a Hollywood filming location for shows like Gunsmoke and Tarzan.

The Oak and Valley nines were built in 1974 by Ted Robinson (or as Tim Jackson dubbed him Teddy “Triple Tier” Robinson), who also co-designed a third nine with his son in the late 1980s. It sometimes feels redundant to use this adjective, but the course was tired. Like nearby Sherwood Country Club, though, the land is nice: rolling but not severe, with deep arroyos cutting through sections and coast live oaks dotting the property.

However, the natural terrain had been flattened for landing zones, with functional but unattractive drainage ditches generally running perpendicularly across the fairways. The bunkers were surrounded by rough and well away from the edges of fairways and greens. The greens themselves, meanwhile, all measured roughly the same square footage. Plus, like many courses of its era, North Ranch was lined with houses.

Although the real estate limited what Jackson Kahn could do, it also allowed them to focus their work on a few key golf features. They are completely rebuilding the greens (in many cases moving them), replacing the consistent “triple-tier” designs with varied shapes and thoughtful contouring. A key feature of Jackson Kahn courses is variance in green size, and the revised North Ranch is no different, with square footage of the new putting surfaces ranging from 3,400’ to 11,000’.

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In addition, Jackson Kahn are rebuilding bunkers with the new greens in mind, aiming to generate more strategic interest while recontouring the previously flattish fairway to better fit the natural topography. They are also updating the course’s storm drainage, adjusting existing waterways and creating new ones to enhance water movement. The manufactured barrancas generally move diagonally rather than straight across the holes in order to present players with more interesting risk-reward scenarios.

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Cart paths are another area of focus. Jackson Kahn decided to reroute most of them with the goal of keeping them out of sightlines as much as possible. On holes where paths ran immediately adjacent to arroyos, Jackson Kahn relocated them to the opposite sides, creating a more natural connection between the golf and the canyons.

The original North Ranch was part of the late 20th-century golf boom, which saw the opening of a huge number of golf courses built with real estate as the top priority, most of them uninspiring. Now many of those courses stand at a crossroads, needing to update aging infrastructure and weighing whether to refresh their architecture at the same time.

Tim Jackson and David Kahn have begun to specialize in the full-redesign option. They have carried out ambitious transformations of the Dunes Course at Monterey Peninsula Country Club, Eugene Country Club, and most recently Conway Farms outside of Chicago, where they reworked a 1991 course designed by their old boss, Tom Fazio. North Ranch fits into a similar category: upgrading key infrastructural components like irrigation while also creating more dynamic golf features.

Jackson Kahn’s work at North Ranch is scheduled to wrap up by the end of September, so we’ll be able to bring you more on the project in the coming months.

Chambers Bay to LIV?

By Garrett Morrison

In last week’s Design Notebook, I wrote about how the USGA’s new approach to U.S. Open site selection has left a number of worthy and willing venues in the lurch. One of these courses, Chambers Bay in Washington, is now exploring alternative ways to stay in the public eye, including a potential partnership with LIV Golf.

Last Friday, John Manley of the Tacoma News Tribune reported that Pierce County, the owner of Chambers Bay, expects to begin talks with the Saudi-backed golf league in “the next couple of weeks.” Manley’s article features several juicy quotes from Pierce County executive counsel Don Anderson, such as the following gem on LIV’s controversial reputation:

“LIV has its own issues, though, golf politics, world politics-wise,” Anderson told The News Tribune this week. “You have to be careful there. They throw a great party, though.”

Props to Manley for making Anderson feel comfortable enough to say stuff like this, I guess?

Anyway, the most revealing parts of the article were Anderson’s insights into the challenges and opportunities facing Chambers Bay as it tries to adjust to a changing golf landscape. A few takeaways:

1. Chambers Bay feels that it has gotten the cold shoulder from the USGA.

According to Manley’s piece, Pierce County leaders have become concerned that Chambers Bay’s relationship with the USGA “is becoming increasingly one-sided.” They see smaller tournaments like the 2028 U.S. Amateur Four-Ball as “mere scraps from the USGA”—a paltry return on Chambers Bay’s investment in re-sodding its greens after the original fescue surfaces struggled during the 2015 U.S. Open.

Anderson adds, however, that Pierce County is still interested in being the USGA’s “attractive cousin who’s a backup date when your prom date can’t go.” (Again, get a load of these quotes!) In other words, if one of the U.S. Open’s scheduled venues drops out unexpectedly, Chambers is available and eager. Probably more eager than your cousin would be in the scenario Anderson outlines.

2. Chambers Bay’s business model doesn’t work unless the course hosts high-profile tournaments frequently.

Pierce County spent $30 million purchasing the Chambers Bay property and $20 million building the golf course. This kind of money is not usually laid out for a facility intended to subsist on local green fees alone. “The economics of this course are not driven by regular golfers who live in Pierce County,” Anderson tells Manley. “It’s driven by people who come here from out of town and pay a higher fee.”

To appeal to traveling golfers, Chambers Bay relies on the marketing proposition of staging televised events on a regular basis. Otherwise the course’s finances don’t make sense. As Anderson put it, “You can’t run a golf course on a tournament every 25 years.” (Well, you can, to be clear. You just can’t run Chambers Bay, in the opinion of Pierce County decision-makers.)

3. LIV Golf appears to be offering a substantially more attractive financial package to host venues than the PGA Tour does.

Anderson cites several benefits of hosting a LIV event, including the abbreviated 54-hole format, the relatively small field, and the prospect of “$5 million or so in concession and merchandise sales.” In contrast, securing a PGA Tour event would, according to Anderson, require Chambers Bay to find “a title sponsor that comes up with 150 percent of the purse”—that is, somewhere between $12 to 30 million. This is yet another respect in which LIV’s access to the world’s largest sovereign wealth fund provides an enormous competitive advantage. (Manley attributes the title-sponsor issue to the PGA of America rather than the PGA Tour, which I’m fairly confident is an error.)

I sympathize with Pierce County executives. When their predecessors approved the Chambers Bay project in the early 2000s, they had no reason to believe that a “mega muni” in the mold of Bethpage Black and Torrey Pines wouldn’t be a major driver of revenue and tourism. But the mega-muni era ended almost as soon as it started, and now Chambers Bay is scrambling to stay relevant.

A number of aging professional golfers in a similar predicament have opted for LIV’s money over the past few years. It wouldn’t be surprising to see Chambers Bay do the same.

A Course We Photographed Recently

The Honors Course (Ooltewah, TN)—designed by Pete Dye in 1983, renovated by Gil Hanse in 2023

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Quotable

“For some unaccountable reason the tees on many golf courses seem to have been given no thought whatever. How frequently on courses with some pretensions we see wretched tees, sadly neglected, badly placed, and insufficient in size! The matter of upkeep is beyond my purpose here, but the size and placement of the tees are vital problems in construction. The first and most important point to have in mind in building tees is to make them wherever possible indistinguishable from a fine bit of fairway. Do not raise them above the level of the fairway unless there is real need for doing so. If they are raised, do work on a big scale so that the rise and fall will be almost imperceptible. A good architect can always be distinguished from his less talented colleagues by the manner in which he builds his tees and by his cleverness in placing them.” -Robert Hunter