If there is one architect whose work IVGD knows intimately, it is Harry Colt. Over the years, we have worked on almost thirty of his courses, from links to heathland, from woodland to downs.
Colt might well be considered the Michelangelo of golf design. Not only did he design great golf courses, he built an astounding amount of them. Virtually everything he built is of an excellent quality, which is in itself an astounding achievement. He was able to achieve this because he and his team were methodological and consistent in their approach. His courses, therefore, have certain trademarks that keep recurring, making it easier for us to tell if and where features have been removed or altered over time. Grass faced bunkers, trees near to greens or bunkers, bunker defence of green complexes that is highly symmetrical, an even number of bunkers surrounding greens - all these are sure signs that something has happened since Colt's time. Above all, his courses have a defined strategy and wonderful variety to their playing characteristics. As a consequence, they fulfill his key criterion for a successful course: "Will it live?";
Having worked on almost thirsty of of his courses and studied many more, we at IVGD regard Colt as an expert craftsman who was extremely consistent in the quality of his work and the execution of his design principles. Throughout the history of golf architecture, there may perhaps have been architects who were more artistic. But if our life depended on the success of a routing and we had been around to influence matters, we would have had Harry do it.
Tom Simpson is probably one of the most creative golf course architects to have ever lived. Many of his best courses are so original and are laden with so much strategy and variety that they are a joy to play. Couple that with his very subtle and organically undulating greens and you have a recipe for greatness.
An important part of his success was on account of him being financially independent, so that he could pretty much do as he wanted without concerns for the consequences. He went so far as to state that he would only lay out a course if there was no interference from the client - quite uncommon then as it is today. From his embroideries of golf holes to his chauffeur driven Rolls Royce to his notion that it was important to place a really bad hole somewhere on the course in order to show just how good the other holes were, he was undoubtedly eccentric. In partnership with Herbert Fowler, he not only was one of the most sought after architects of the 1920s but also a partner in the first practice to offer detailed renovation services - a man after our own heart.
At IVGD, we love restoring the many little intricate details of Simpson's courses, be it his trademark lace edged bunkers, his highly irregular green shapes or the complex strategies of his holes that have been lost through the passage of time or tree growth.
Herbert Fowler originally excelled as a county cricketer, playing for his home county of Somerset for several seasons. But once he turned his mind to golf, he was proficient enough to be placed 26th in the 1900 Open Championship when well into his forties. A troubled career in banking led to him leaving the West Country when, despite his only previous experience being the laying out of 9 holes at Taunton & Pickeridge, his brother-in-law invited him to design a course on land which he had recently acquired on Walton Heath in Surrey. Thus began an illustrious career in golf architecture.
Within a few years, he had partnered with Tom Simpson. After WW1, on account of renewed demand for its services in America and Britain in particular, Arthur Croome and John Abercromby joined Fowler & Simpson as junior partners, forming the clearest competitor to Colt & Co. Having been the first architect to include automated irrigation systems in his work (at Walton Heath), Fowler devoted a lot of his time to the renovation and redesign of existing routings, especially when in America. As a consequence, he designed relatively few courses. (Less than 20 Fowler courses remain in existence.) Whilst in California, he pioneered modern agronomy techniques, often replacing oil greens with grassed surfaces.
As with Colt, he espoused asymmetrical risk in all elements of his design. When first setting out a course, he would search for the best sites for his par 3s and then build the course around them, which is why some of his most memorable holes are his one-shotters especially at courses such as LA Country Club, The Berkshire and Eastward Ho!
Hugh Alison undertook a lot of the travelling for Colt & Co, dealing with most of the company's activities in the US and Japan. Being separated from his two partners allowed his style to develop a little differently from what we have come to expect from Colt himself in Europe.
His style was a lot wilder. It provided more drama and was often a tougher test. In certain situations, it was a heady cocktail of penal and heroic. Courses such as Timber Point and Royal Hague gave players much more opportunity to lose a lot of balls than, say, Swinley Forest or De Pan. It is also striking that his hazards were built on a much larger scale, although this is one facet which he reined in once back in Europe in the mid 1930s. Finally, he used a lot more crowned greens than his master, making a shot not struck perfectly more easily repelled away from the pin.
Alison deserves to be regarded as a gifted architect in his own right, rather than as just one of the partners of Colt & Co. At IVGD, we look forward to restoring more of his idiosyncratic layouts in the future.
The fact that John Morrison is one of the lesser known architects who worked for Colt & Co does not make him any less interesting. He was quite literally a larger than life person, who was not only a great sportsman excelling at football, cricket and golf, but also a bomber pilot in WWI and one of the first to land a plane on an aircraft carrier.
Morrison did most of the travelling around Europe for Colt & Co and worked with Colt on such great courses as Kennemer, Falkenstein, Eindhoven, Frankfurt and Stockholm. Most of his solo work was in Germany. Sadly, very little of it is left. In Holland, his principal design work was at Toxandria. The key element of his design style that stands out immediately is his raised plateau greens, particularly on some of his par 3s. His German work included large ragged edge bunkers which were different in style to Colt courses in Britain.
In his latter years, as the last surviving member of the partnership, he became Managing Director of Colt, Alison & Morrison.
Frank Pennink was one of the post WWII generation of golf architects who worked on many of Britain's and Europe's great courses as well as designing a number of well known new ones himself. Most of these were in Holland, such as Noordwijk and the A holes at Kennemer, but he also designed Villamoura Old in Portugal.
He was a very good golfer, winning the English Amateur twice, and was part of the Walker Cup team in 1938. He undertook a lot of commissions in the Netherlands, probably because one of his parents was Dutch. His design philosophy was very much in line with the golden age architects such as Colt and Simpson. But in many cases he had to deal with very modest budgets. This forced him to focus his attentions on creating high quality greens but, at the the same time, forced him to save money by deploying very few fairway bunkers and creating relatively simple green surrounds.
IVGD's renovations of Pennink courses have focused on restoring the original width of the playing corridors, restoring and refining bunker shapes, improving the strategy through fairway bunkering and improving the detailing of green surrounds.
Bernhard von Limburger is undoubtedly the most successful and most skilled German golf architect that ever lived. He admired and studied the work of the British golden age architects such as Harry Colt, Alistair MacKenzie and Tom Simpson and adopted key elements of their design philosophies. Spanning 5 decades from the 1930’s to the 1970’s, von Limburger designed or re-designed around 70 golf courses in Germany, Austria and Switzerland.
Although Bernhard von Limburger was trained as a lawyer, he never really earned his living in that profession but rather chose to fully dedicate himself to golf, not just becoming the leading golf architect in the country but also becoming the first and very successful golf journalist as he initiated the first German golf journal, published a very successful introductory book on golf and later in his carreer published many essays on golf.
As a golf architect, a key strength of Bernhard von Limburger was his ability to lay out courses with beautiful routings that offered a lot of variety and took full advantage of the topography and the available land. Also, he was very consistent and skilled when designing his green complexes which are characterised by mild green undulations, asymmetric and very visible sand faced bunkers and interesting run-offs and undulations around the greens. Many of Germany’s top golf courses to this date were either designed or re-designed by Bernhard von Limburger. His best-known courses probably are Cologne-Refrath, Hubbelrath and Club zur Vahr.