Meadowbrook Country Club (MI)

Favorite Hole

No. 14, par 4, 338 yards

One of several holes at Meadowbrook that takes direct inspiration from Willie Park’s contemporaries rather than from Park himself, this short par 4 has a Lion’s Mouth green that wouldn’t look out of place on a restored Seth Raynor design.

Aficionados of Golden Age (and “Second Golden Age”) golf architecture will have seen their share of Lion’s Mouths—not only at classic courses like Los Angeles Country Club and Country Club of Charleston, but at nearly every Coore & Crenshaw design. What makes Andy Staples’s version at Meadowbrook different is the topography of the enormously wide fairway. The tee shot is blind, playing over “Coronary Hill,” but presents your options clearly: a plateau on the left, another on the right, and a deep channel between. Since the low ground in the middle of the fairway offers no view of the green, you’re forced to choose between left and right. A pegboard by the tee showing the day’s pin position will assist in your decision.

Another of Staples’s twists on the Lion’s Mouth template is a crescent-shaped tier that divides the generous back portion of the green from a small low section around the central bunker. Pins on the front shelf are treacherous and fun, resulting in lots of birdies and probably more double bogeys.

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Overall Thoughts

Green committees have a tendency toward monkey-see, monkey-do behavior. Seventy years ago, a large group of America’s most prominent clubs decided near-simultaneously that Robert Trent Jones was their man. A few decades later, Jones’s son Rees became the architect of choice. Recently, many of the same clubs have opted for restoration (complemented by 21st-century touches such as PrecisionAire drainage and Better Billy Bunker linkers), often performed by Gil Hanse or Andrew Green.

Don’t get me wrong: the consulting work of Hanse and Green—not to mention that of Coore & Crenshaw, Tom Doak, Keith Foster, Tyler Rae, Kyle Franz, etc.—has been far more thoughtful and deft than the “Open Doctor” routine of Jones and son. The restoration movement has given back many vintage courses their original character and playability. There’s no doubt, however, that a basic formula has emerged: choose the most recognizable name among the course’s roster of architects, say you’re restoring his design, present historical plans and photos as evidence, remove a bunch of trees, push out mowing lines, naturalize bunker edges, and, when it’s time to reopen, distribute some golden-hour photos to the media.

Again, I nearly always endorse these moves. But I also appreciate when a club goes against the grain, hires someone unexpected, and—most importantly—has the courage to allow unique architecture to be put in the ground.

A decade ago, as it mulled options for a capital improvement project, Meadowbrook Country Club could have followed a well-worn path. Donald Ross, perhaps the best-known (or at least the most-restored) architect of golf’s Golden Age, made changes to the course in the early 1930s. For many green committees, this would have been reason enough to pursue a full-fledged Ross restoration. Instead, Meadowbrook took a risk: it brought on Andy Staples, an architect known more for new builds and redesigns than historically faithful work, and asked him to reinvent the course in the style of Willie Park Jr.

It was an odd brief in a couple of ways. First, Park had designed only six holes at Meadowbrook, so the project could not be a restoration, strictly speaking. Rather than uncovering or re-creating previously existing features, Staples would need to approximate what Park might have done. Second, Park’s style is not well understood. Many of his original designs were rather rudimentary, while others, like Sunningdale and Huntercombe in the English heathlands, were highly sophisticated and singular. So even before guessing at how Park would have built the remaining holes at Meadowbrook, Staples would have to form a notion of who Park was as an architect.

In the Q&A below this review, Staples describes how he thought through these complicated matters. One key to his approach is that he wasn’t overly precious about the historical record. He gave himself permission to be selective—for instance, to pluck Huntercombe out of Park’s catalog and hold it up as a primary reference point. Nor did Staples limit himself to Park’s work only; he brought in other sources of inspiration, such as C.B. Macdonald and Seth Raynor’s templates and Oakmont Country Club’s green contours and drainage ditches. As a result, Meadowbrook became a tribute not just to Park’s architecture but to early-Golden Age design as a whole.

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The most talked-about hole at Meadowbrook will always be the short par-4 third, adapted from the famous fourth at Huntercombe. The two-tiered, “L”-shaped green is unforgettably wild. The lower tier is hidden from view but provides backboarding contours for those who find the right side of the fairway. The upper tier is visible but narrow and surrounded by runoffs. Playing into it is nerve-wracking from any position, though somewhat easier from the left.

Just as impressive as the boldness of the third is the restraint of the fifth. This long par 4 rambles up and over a series of natural, chaotic rolls before arriving at a punchbowl green. Only on reflection do you realize that it is a bunkerless hole—the only one on the course. The land is so good that artificial hazards would be superfluous.

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The early-Golden Age style—often marked by vertical features like mounds and berms, rugged (but not exactly naturalistic) aesthetics, and angular green shapes and contours—is hot right now, and will get hotter as the excitement around Brian Schneider and Blake Conant’s work at Old Barnwell increases. Andy Staples’s reimagining of Meadowbrook was at the forefront of this trend, and we should remember it as not just a successful project, but an important one. -GM

1 Egg

Meadowbrook earns its Egg for strengths across our categories of land, design, and presentation. So why does it get one Egg rather than two or three? First of all, please remember—tell your friends! call your mom and let her know!—that receiving any Eggs at all puts a golf course in rarefied air. And frankly, Meadowbrook is close to two-Egg status. A few weaknesses prevent it from getting there, though: 1) the second half of the back nine has some dull-ish parallel holes, 2) the shaping lacks the extra level of elegance and distinctiveness that sets the best design-build work apart, and 3) the greens are maintained at speeds that don’t suit the severe contouring. But let us emphasize that we love this course!

Q&A with Renovation Architect Andy Staples

Why did Meadowbrook Country Club initially decide to do work on its golf course? What was your basic brief at the beginning?

As with a lot of renovation projects, the desire for improvements at Meadowbrook initially arose due to the need for infrastructure updates. There were three main factors that drove the decision. First, the course was one of many across the Midwest that was impacted by the selective herbicide Imprelis, whereby the course saw a significant amount of tree damage, and was awarded a significant sum of money via a settlement with DuPont. The second factor was the severe turf damage after the winter of 2014, where, again, many courses were affected by tremendous turf loss due to prolonged ice cover on their greens. Third, there was a desire to increase drainage across the site in order to reduce the number of days lost to rain, and to increase playability, with a specific focus on the entries into the greens.

The leaders of the club started asking how they should handle their current tree inventory, looked for technology on how to dry the course down, and then asked serious questions about the sustainability of their current push-up greens. So the initial design brief was really to come up with a plan to address these factors, and prepare their course to be more resilient and playable in the future. The conversation around the course architectural history and style evolved from there.

How did you and the club go about deciding to do a renovation in the spirit of Willie Park Jr.?

During the initial Master Plan meetings, the Committee and I brainstormed how the current greens and their condition would fit into our plan for the course. What style are they? How were they constructed? Why did they have so much turf loss where other courses in the area didn’t see the same effects? We also dug deep into the history of the course, how it evolved over time, and who had the largest hand in the current presentation of the course.

Of the variety of styles of greens that were there on the ground, the original Willie Park Jr. greens were the ones that stood out to me as being the most interesting, and had the most charm. Park was only able to build the first six holes of the original course, of which four greens still existed—including a rather interestingly (if not excessively) sloped green on No. 2. This was the most talked-about green, which, at today’s speeds, had many players putting off the green if they were above the hole!

Needless to say, this journey through history led us to an incredible research project of Park’s design philosophy, and how his work could and should guide the Master Plan. It also helped that the Club was approaching their Centennial, having been founded in 1916. It was an easy connection to make, both in terms of what was on the ground at Meadowbrook, and the connection Park had to other notable courses in Michigan (Battle Creek, Red Run, Pine Lake) and throughout North America (Maidstone, Olympia Fields, Mount Bruno). Once the leadership rediscovered this history, and their connection to Park himself, the Club forged ahead to unify the design of their golf course to look and feel like it was originally envisioned by Park in 1916.

Donald Ross also left his fingerprints on Meadowbrook. A lot of consulting architects would have made a meal out of that connection and done something more Ross-inspired. Why didn’t you go in that direction?

Well, Ross did have a hand on at least two greens that existed at the time (Nos. 12 and 18), which we ultimately kept in our final plan. Research suggests Ross rebuilt the 14th green as well—however, this green had been renovated and completely changed in the early 1970s. It’s also pretty well known that Ross had a significant influence on other top-shelf courses in the area such as Franklin Hills, Oakland Hills, Detroit Golf Club, and others.

Willie Park’s design genius was certainly not recognized at the same level as Ross, so we saw this as an opening to make a bit more of a statement. Most of Park’s other courses in the area had made significant changes to their courses over the years that dramatically changed his original design intent. So we believed the Park connection would prove to be a stronger differentiator, and opportunity. And quite honestly, Park’s existing greens were pretty good, and having a set of 18 great Park-inspired greens proved to be a desirable goal given we already had something to go off of.

The Meadowbrook project is so interesting because while it is very invested in history, it is not a restoration. Since you weren’t solely, or even primarily, restoring specific features that used to exist on site, how did you decide what constituted Willie Park-inspired work? What aspects of his architectural style did you try to incorporate into the renovated Meadowbrook?

With it not being a true restoration, I certainly felt we had the unique freedom to pull inspiration from a number of Park’s greatest works, and create a showcase of these design features with a bit of our own research and interpretation. Ultimately, it was our trip to England, including an incredible experience at Huntercombe, that gave us the confidence that we would be able to bring some very interesting features back to the U.S.—ones that we felt were not adequately represented in Park’s North American work.

Park’s greens at Huntercombe are phenomenal! They feel so natural, yet are meticulously crafted in their engineering and strategy. I also went full-steam into studying his non-sand hazard strategy of above ground ridges and mounds, as well as his in-ground pits and pots. All of these features give his early work such character and challenge without the excessive use of sand bunkering. I found it to be incredibly inspiring to know Park himself owned Huntercombe, and put his heart and soul into building the course. I knew if I used some of that essence in our work at Meadowbrook, it would prove to create something unique.

So I’d say the overall answer to the question is—it depends! While we certainly had an “on paper” Master Plan that reflected all our research and planning, much of the architectural styling happened when we were actually building the features in the field. The vision was inspired by various themes we saw throughout all of Park’s courses, and I used those memories, along with our understanding of how we wanted each hole to play, to create what you see today.

I wouldn’t say we were limited to just Park inspiration, either—I also made my first visit to Oakmont that year, and I was blown away by the detailing of the greens and surrounding slopes, the drainage ditches, and the fescue areas. You can certainly see that influence in the features across the course at Meadowbrook.

There’s something to be said for “how they did it in the old days,” and having the freedom to be creative and flexible in the field is what really brought the details together at Meadowbrook. We kept telling ourselves to only build and approve final features that looked like they have been there forever. Our Committee trusted in this vision, and the result was a great tribute to Park’s legacy, and a story the club is proud to call its own.

Course Tour

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