The Dunes Club

Favorite Hole

No. 6, par 3, 70-185 yards

Variety is the watchword at the Dunes Club, and the sixth hole is no exception. This par 3 can vary significantly in both yardage and angle. Playing from the back-left tee is a sharply different experience than playing from the front-right (“blueberry”) tee. The former requires an uphill mid-iron shot over dramatic bunkers, while the latter calls for a mere flip wedge. This kind of versatility is what makes the Dunes Club’s nine holes such a pleasure to play over and over.

Jim Urbina recently reworked the sixth green, adding some subtle internal contour.

{{content-block-course-profile-the-dunes-club-002}}

Overall Thoughts

The Dunes Club has an important place in the history of modern golf. When greeting-card mogul Mike Keiser turned 60 acres of land next to his southwest Michigan lake house into a nine-hole course, it marked the beginning of a transformative career in golf development. The Dunes Club embodies many aspects of Keiser’s vision for the future of American golf. That said, the Dunes Club is not an architectural masterpiece. Instead, it serves as a prism through which Keiser’s later projects, including Bandon Dunes and other Dream Golf resorts, can be evaluated.

From the moment your car rolls through the Dunes Club’s unassuming gate, you can tell that the focus is on golf. There’s no grand entrance sign, only a gap in a chain-link fence. No range, no kitchen; instead, you find a tiny clubhouse, a closet for a pro shop, a small changing room, an outdoor grill, and a few tables. These minimal amenities ensure that the Dunes Club experience centers on the course and the natural landscape.

Located in a stunning part of the country, the course’s greatest strength is its natural features. New Buffalo is a popular destination for Chicagoans, often referred to as “The Hamptons” of the city. The area, like Long Island, provides excellent ground for golf. The Dunes Club sits on sand dunes, amidst a mature forest with an elevation changes of fifty feet. The course’s site and aesthetics are often likened to those of Pine Valley—but I’ll stop the comparison there. It’s a good course but not one of the greatest ever built.

Conceived in the late 1980s, the Dunes Club is a course from another era. Minimalism was just taking root on the fringes of the golf world, and today’s leading architects, Bill Coore and Tom Doak, had not yet established national reputations. Keiser chose Dick Nugent, a well-known designer in the Chicagoland area, whose most notable work was Kemper Lakes Golf Club, host of the 1989 PGA Championship. Nugent, to put it mildly, was not known for architectural restraint. The Dunes Club ended up being his least representative design. It was his attempt at minimalism, no doubt influenced by Keiser’s strong vision. The guiding example of Pine Valley appears to have helped Nugent commit to some effective construction methods. The bunkers and sandy waste areas, for instance, blend seamlessly with the natural landscape.

The 50-foot sand dune at the center of the property is the main attraction. The routing, while not ideal in the sense that it includes six parallel holes, does a fine job of featuring this landform. First introduced on the fifth hole, the dune is a focal point of the rest of the course. The sixth plays along it; the seventh plays off of it on the drive and back up onto it on the approach; the eighth descends it; and the ninth plays back into it. While the dune enhances the drama of the finish, I often think about how an alternate routing might get players to it earlier in the round.

One of the most successful aspects of Nugent’s design is the variety of teeing areas. Every hole at the Dunes Club has a range of tee boxes, allowing for malleability in the layout. Both of the par 3s offer tees that dramatically alter the angle of play, making the holes look, feel, and play differently from day to day. This flexibility is especially important for a nine-hole golf course with a regular membership, as it adds novelty to each round. I’m surprised, frankly, that more local country clubs don’t use this tactic to keep the golf experience fresh. What makes the Dunes Club special is not just that it has alternate teeing grounds, but that it actually promotes their use. For members, a day might go like this: play one set of tees in the mid-morning, have lunch, play a completely different set of tees in the early afternoon, and then head to the lake with the family.

Trees play a significant role at the Dunes Club. In a very 1980s fashion, each hole feels isolated from the others. On one hand, this creates a peaceful and beautiful setting, particularly in the fall, as some of our photos suggest. On the other, the dense groupings of trees limit long views of the property and feel claustrophobic in places. There’s no need for extensive clearing, but selective tree removal could expose the grandeur of the site.

Another mark of the Dunes Club’s era of design is that it’s more an execution test than a strategic one. The fairways are lined by trees and native grasses that penalize wide misses. Also, the fifth and eighth holes feature significant forced carries. These holes aren’t bad; both have compelling features. The fifth is a challenging par 4 requiring a tee shot to a wide fairway and a mid-length approach over a lake, and the eighth, like the third, has a “Hell’s Half Acre”-like Great Hazard. Still, the Dunes Club tends to widen the gap between low and high handicappers, which is not a characteristic of subsequent Keiser properties.

Despite a few shortcomings, the Dunes Club provides a terrific experience because it’s all about the golf. It’s a walking-only club with charming food offerings, a friendly staff, and a relaxing atmosphere. This is a place you visit to appreciate its intrinsic beauty and its historical significance in the modern era of golf development. Without the Dunes Club, we probably wouldn’t have gotten Bandon Dunes, and then we definitely wouldn’t have gotten Sand Valley, Cabot Cape Breton, or the upcoming Rodeo Dunes. -AJ

1 Egg

The land is the star and what earns the Egg. While the Dunes Club grounds crew does a wonderful job with the conditioning of the course, some tree removal would improve the playing conditions and overall presentation of the architecture. This is an excellent nine-hole golf course that could benefit from a few tweaks.

Course Tour

{{content-block-course-profile-the-dunes-club-003}}{{content-block-course-profile-the-dunes-club-004}}