Dornick Hills Golf & Country Club

About the club

Dornick Hills was the first course Perry Maxwell built, and it is the course where he tinkered and honed his architectural chops while switching careers to golf design (he was previously in banking). It was his home course, as he lived on property, and owned the land it's built on. The design retains a charming, experimental, rough-edged character that's been polished out of other courses like Southern Hills and Colonial, as fine as they are, through endless rounds of investment and improvement. Over the decades, Dornick Hills, in the southern part of the state near the Texas border, rarely had the resources to invest in upgrades, so it still feels (and plays) like it might have in the 1920s and '30s. Nevertheless, it remains a fine, extraordinarily distinctive collection of early Maxwell holes on a unique property that features one of golf's great holes, the par-5 16th, with a green on top of a 40-foot high sheer cliff wall. Tom Doak and his team at Renaissance Golf renovated the course in 2021, clearing brush and trying to imitate the putting contours that Maxwell originally built, though no existing plans remain for what those might have looked like. How close they got will never be known, but their work and the overall setting make Dornick Hills a must-see museum piece for fans of Maxwell and classical era architecture.