Rancho Santa Fe Golf Club

The Southern California-based golf course designer and writer Max Behr, who worked primarily in the 1920s and ‘30s, is a favorite among architecture scholars for his dense philosophical essays about strategy and psychology. He wasn’t as prolific at building courses as regional contemporaries like William Watson and William Bell, but those he did design, like Rancho Santa Fe north of San Diego, were packed with nuance and simple strategic intrigue. Scottish designer David McLay Kidd doesn’t typically take on historical renovations (he prefers to put his own new ideas in the ground), but he was taken by the efficient arrangement of holes that run up and down a narrow valley and the essence of what remained of Behr’s ideas, and committed himself to drawing them out. The result following the work in 2021 is a distillation of classical era angles and options that focused on bunker replacement, select tree removal and recreating large putting surfaces that spill into short-grass surrounds leaving players a multitude of recovery shots.