How I Built the World's Most Beautiful Golf Courses

By Jen Haley

How does one become one of the world's most highly sought-after golf course architect? Just ask 43-year-old Scotland native David McLay Kidd. He was the mind behind Bandon Dunes in Oregon and the Castle Course in St. Andrews, Scotland. Now's he hard at work on a $360 million course in Korea. "How do you become a golf course designer? You just call yourself one," he says flippantly.

If only it was that easy.

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McLay Kidd had the advantage of almost having golf course design in his DNA. Son of a golf course superintendent in Glasgow, he grew up loving everything about the business of golf. "I guess, it is not like becoming an accountant or
a lawyer -- you can't go to school and study for a number of years and
get a certificate and then you are a golf course designer," he says.

Most of the successful ones come from a golf family like he did. Then they go on to study landscape architecture, horticulture, conventional architecture, and engineering. And they all tend to have an overriding passion for the game.

But the real secret to his success, says McLay Kidd, is his ability to see the bigger picture.

"If I was looking at any piece of land and I wanted to explore it with you and I wanted to share with you the high points and low points, the intimate points and the adventurous points, I would take you on a route through it; it would be a natural route in my head because I would know it so well. I would want to keep the really exciting view to the end, I would want to show you the crops of trees over there, and the little brook and I am going to take you on a sequence of this piece of land. And that is what I exactly want to do with a golf course."

But designing golf courses is about more than pretty views. It's
about savvy project management. As an architect, you decide how the course is
played and how much it will cost. A course with large greens, for example, is going to mean a larger water bill. McLay Kidd's approach is to always let nature take the lead role.

Check out the video above to hear him explain how he's weaving sustainability into his designs, and how he's trying to reintroduce Americans to the game they stole away from the Scots.