Kinsale Club in Naples focuses on strategic genius of Hanse and Wagner
The Kinsale Club in Naples proves that great architects can turn a flat piece of land into a great challenge and opportunity for the thinking golfer.
- Kinsale Club’s new private golf course, designed by Gil Hanse and Jim Wagner, prioritizes strategy and shot-making.
- The course features a classic design inspired by Golden Age architects with strategically placed bunkers and firm, fast playing surfaces.
- Hanse and Wagner, known for their restoration work on famous courses, find creative freedom in building a new course from scratch.
NAPLES, Fla. – Kinsale Club, with its new private course designed by Gil Hanse and Jim Wagner, showcases what a great team of architects can do with a flat piece of land.
Given 174 acres to accommodate the entire club – including parking and all amenities – Hanse and Wagner had to construct all the intrigue from the course with hard boundary edges, a preserved area of wetland at the center and no distinguished landforms rising from the site just a few hundred yards from the Gulf of Mexico. To make it all work, they relied on classic architectural templates for inspiration, making golfers consider strategy and proper lines for every swing.
That strategy is dictated mostly by sand – lots of sand. Wherever you might want to land a tee ball, there’s often a steep-faced, relatively flat-bottomed bunker in the way. Players must steer their balls around all the hazards, often playing toward the edges of wide fairways to set up the best line for an approach shot. Heading into the greens, plenty more bunkers await. Players who take the proper lines off the tee are rewarded with a much more welcoming approach through all the sand and past the frequent run-offs.
It’s old-school strategy at it’s finest. No reward is granted without a fair bit of risk. It’s the best type of golf, and it makes Kinsale stand out in a state where, on too many courses, strategy is dictated as a game of avoiding water. Such design is especially effective when married to firm and fast playing surfaces, as director of agronomy Rusty Mercer has provided at Kinsale. Hanse and Wagner told members they were inspired by Golden Age architects C.B. Macdonald and Seth Raynor, and Kinsale certainly calls to mind their work.
It all adds up to a private course where members should never get bored with playing the same shots again and again. Strategy shifts as holes locations change, and there are multiple ways to play almost every approach shot.
Hanse and Wagner have gained fame as the restorers of many classic layouts, jobs for which they put aside their own ideas and try to recreate what original architects had in mind. Los Angeles Country Club, Oakland Hills, The Country Club, Winged Foot, Southern Hills, Merion, Oakmont, on and on – Hanse and Wagner have restored many major championship sites, and many casual golf fans know them best for their work on such Golden Age stalwarts.
But building a new course scratches a different kind of itch for the design duo. Their work at Ohoopee Match Club in Georgia and CapRock Ranch in Nebraska, in particular, rank among the top 20 modern courses in the U.S.
“From a creativity standpoint, new construction is so much more liberating because of the way we’ve chosen to do restoration, being beholden to the original architects,” Hanse said during a preview showing of plans for SkyFall, their new project at Forest Dunes in Michigan. “So there’s not a lot of creativity and not a lot of original ideas. It’s more restoration research and then trying to create in the same style and what we see there. Whereas with the new stuff, we can do kind of whatever we want.”
Clearly, what they wanted at Kinsale was to challenge golfers on every shot. To create interest on a site that didn’t start as much. And to thrill the club’s members for every round with a wide variety of interesting shots and incredible greens inspired by templates that have stood the test of time.
It will take time to see where Kinsale Club is eventually ranked by Golfweek’s Best course-rating program. Below, this author shares his thoughts on how Kinsale Club’s layout stacks up in our 10 rating criteria. Our hundreds of raters assign a score of 1 to 10 for each criterion, then offer an overall rating. In non-definitive terms, any course that averages above 6 out of 10 might be the best course in many areas and certainly worth a drive across town, a course averaging 7 out of 10 is a seriously solid layout, and anything above an 8 is one of the best courses in the country. There are only a handful of courses rated above 9 in the world.
1. Routing of Kinsale Club
How well the holes individually and collectively adhere to the land and to each other.
This site for Kinsale Club was a flat piece of ground with squared-off boundaries, and Hanse and Wagner had no prominent features to play into and away from. They fashioned a first seven holes that play out to a far point at the northwest corner and back before spinning into the separate back nine that plays mostly into the northwest corner. The course was built with walking in mind and is an easy stroll. One unusual choice: The par-5 12th plays to the south next to the range and toward the clubhouse, then players shift to the side for the par-3 13th, which tees off across the line of No. 12 headed west. It calls to mind the far end of the Old Course at St. Andrews, where No. 11 crosses No. 7 fairway.
My rating: 7
