Building your own golf course might sound like something reserved for the ultra-rich, but if you have access to enough land to lay down a few holes, there’s no reason why you can’t design your own course. If you have a large plot of land to work with, designing your own home course can be a fantastic long-term DIY landscaping project.
At the professional level, golf course design today is a high-tech industry and a massive global business. However, whatever scale you are doing your golf course design at, the basic rules remain the same.
Observing the Site
Before you can start laying down any detailed plans for your course, you need to get a lay of the land. Traditionally, this has been done by taking a helicopter flight over the landscape and surveying the area. Today, this is more likely to be done with a drone and a camera.
Working with the natural topography of the land will make building the course easier, but it is relatively easy to transform a small area, either raising or lowering the land and adding obstacles and traps.
The Routing
The routing refers to the flow of players through your course, where the holes are going to go and how players are going to travel between them.
For smaller courses, this is a pretty easy thing to get right, but larger courses will require a much more thoughtful approach.
On larger courses, there will usually be a reasonable number of pathways connecting everything together. If you’re looking to add this kind of detail to a golf course, Kafka Granite sells a wax polymer pathway mix that is perfect for walkways and pathways; they also sell Kafka golf course sand, which is ideal for filling bunkers. Even on the most basic course, you need to think carefully about how you place holes and pathways relative to one another.
Setting a Course Strategy
This is where you work out how and where you are going to challenge the player using the terrain. By both incorporating natural obstacles and adding a number of your own, you can adjust the difficulty of each hole. You can even construct your own artificial obstacles if you want.
You will also need to work out precisely where each hole begins and ends and what the ideal route for the player to take is. It is important to think carefully about how you vary the challenge of each hole as you go.
You don’t necessarily need each hole to be more difficult than the last. If you’re building your own course, you may lay it out so that you can practice different techniques as you go.
Golf course design is both an art and a science. A considerable amount of thought and consideration goes into even a relatively simple course. Understanding the fundamentals of golf course design isn’t just useful for anyone looking to build their own course, it’s also useful for players who want to understand the courses they play better.
