Somerset Hills Country Club

Favorite Hole

No. 14, par 4, 349-416 yards

Jesus, what a green. The front-right tongue, restored by Slawnik in 2010, appears to flow out of the natural downward movement of the land. Midway into the green, Tillinghast’s design seamlessly transitions into artificiality—a propped-up back portion, defined by a speed bump on the left and a backboard on the right. The pin position, which you can scout from the 13th tee, determines which side of the wide fairway you’ll want to favor off the tee.

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Overall Thoughts

When a 40-year-old A.W. Tillinghast designed Somerset Hills in 1916, he was several years away from his career-defining commissions at Winged Foot and Baltusrol. His style had not yet settled into a groove.

Similarly, golf architecture in America was still in its formative stages. One milestone was the debut of C.B. Macdonald’s National Golf Links in 1911; another was the 1917 opening of the Lido, Macdonald’s other tour de force on Long Island. George Crump’s Pine Valley, where Tillinghast had made important contributions, was coming together in spite of agronomic difficulties. But it wouldn’t be until the next decade that the U.S. Golden Age would fully arrive with Alister MacKenzie’s and George Thomas’s California designs and many of Seth Raynor’s and Donald Ross’s best-known efforts. So in the mid-10s, American golf course design was just coming of age—inexperienced, but also fresh and full of excitement.

This spirit is evident in Tillinghast’s work at Somerset Hills. He would build equally great courses later in his career, but he’d rarely match the playfulness of features like the “Dolemites” around the fourth and sixth holes or contours like those on the fifth, and 14th greens. (His greens at Winged Foot West are in the same ballpark.) This is golf architecture without the constraints of custom.

But it’s not without precedent. More than any other Tillinghast course, Somerset Hills reflects the influence of Macdonald and Raynor. There are both overt tributes—the Redan second, the punchbowl third, the principal’s-nose bunker complexes on 4 and 13, the Biarritz-like swale running through the 13th green—and subtle parallels: the grass-faced bunkers of varying shapes and arrangements, the overall preference for building key strategic features vertically rather than blending them into the grade. This isn’t to say that the design is derivative, more that it shows Tillinghast absorbing and adapting the leading ideas of his time. And it makes for fascinating golf.

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The seventh hole embodies many of the course’s strengths. This hefty par 4 at the southeast boundary of the property begins with an uphill tee shot. The old racetrack, basically a big trench, curves along the right edge of the fairway before crossing about 300 yards from the back tee. A drive that reaches the crest of the hill just short of the racetrack earns a clear view of the next shot—a long approach ideally played as a low runner, taking advantage of the downslope into the green. At first, the green looks simple, but when you get closer, you see a hollow toward the back that enables some tricky pin positions.

Here we have a little of everything. There’s place-based quirk (the racetrack), intimidation and difficulty (the tee shot), friendliness and fun (the approach), balanced demands for power and shotmaking (first shot vs. second shot), and concentrated bursts of bold design (the hollow).

The reason all of this richness is legible to golfers today is that the club prioritizes its history. As Thomas Dunne noted in an article for the Metropolitan Golf Association, Somerset’s mission statement consists of three commands: “preserve the integrity of the golf course; restore critical design features; and improve the efficient maintenance of the course and its surroundings.” If more courses were to adopt these precepts and take them seriously enough to hire talented stewards like Slawnik and Tuxhorn, golf architecture would be in a better place. -GM

2 Eggs

Full disclosure, we came close to adding an Egg and rating Somerset Hills among the very best golf courses in the world. That’s how good it is. But the land, while excellent, falls somewhat short of astonishing, and a few of the best greens, particularly the fourth and the 11th, don’t quite function as intended at modern speeds. (And to be clear, we’d advocate changing the speeds, not the greens!)

Additional Content

https://thefriedegg.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/Somerset-Hills-Club-TFE-Chat.mp3

Course Tour

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