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When I looked up, I was in southwest Florida. When I looked down, I might as well have been in the Hamptons. Above eye level, luxury condominium towers. Below, golf holes that would have fit right in next door to Maidstone, Shinnecock Hills and the National Golf Links of America.
In addition to challenging your various golf skills - mediocre though they may be - great golf courses can play with your sense of place and time as well. That latter bit of alchemy usually requires some years of bedding-in and maturation, but Kinsale Golf Club, a new private club near Naples laid out by Gil Hanse & Jim Wagner - with Wagner sitting first-chair for the project - arrived practically fully-formed in December 2024.
On a completely flat piece of ground that by all modern standards would be considered tiny, less than half a mile from gulf beaches, the duo that is arguably the most sought-after in golf design today managed to create a delightful members' course that is both challenging and fun, both unique and evocative.
Kinsale's compactness is one of its greatest assets, thanks to a routing that spares none of its golf-ready 117 acres. 57 further acres of preserved wetlands cut into the midsection of the total 174-acre plot, with the holes making a U-shape around it. The opening four holes - back-to-back par 5s, a short par 4 and a long par 3 - make a strong opening statement, proclaiming Kinsale's match-play readiness while transporting golfers effortlessly to the farthest point from the clubhouse. No more than two holes ever run in similar directions, which keeps the golfer off balance in the winds that tend to sweep across the mostly open site. One fun quirk of Kinsale's routing comes early in the back nine, where in order to safely accommodate a driving range, Wagner & Hanse fashioned an old-school crossover, where approaches into the par-5 12th green and tee shots on the par-3 13th criss-cross. The club's relatively mild flow of traffic, thanks to a membership capped well under 300, makes this junction charming, rather than annoying or dangerous.
Despite its modest acreage, Kinsale never feels cramped or tight. It makes the most of its scale, thanks in large part to a lack of interior trees. Instead, the holes are bordered by a mix of beachy vegetation and exposed sand, which further points north and east, to Long Island's east end. In contrast to many new courses whose swollen fairways often feel impossible to miss, Kinsale turns most tee shots into high-leverage situations where both direction and distance matter greatly. Though selective aggression is rewarded, gearing down from driver is smart in many cases, and it makes the course's seemingly mild yardage - 6,800 yards, par 71 from the tips - punch above its weight.
Water comes into play sparingly, and always as a flanking hazard, rather than one that must be carried. Bunkers - 153 of them - are Kinsale's main obstacle, occupying both strategic physical space at strategic points on every hole and psychological space in the heads of the golfers. To achieve this dual effect, Wagner & Hanse sunk the majority of flat-bottomed bunkers well below surface level, such that many of them present as just their steep grass faces. What a golfer cannot see is often scarier than what is obvious, and this deliberate game of hide-and-seek contrasts with much of the flashy, eye-candy bunkering that is popular at other newer courses.
Like many superb golf courses, Kinsale gets more interesting the closer to the hole one gets. Its green complexes feature tremendous variety in size, shape and contour profile, all while staying in-theme with one another. A near-complete absence of long rough means that a golfer will need a full complement of short-grass short-game shots which, due to the magnificently firm turf maintained by head agronomist Rusty Mercer and his staff, are often best played along the ground. Internal green contours lean more convex than concave, though the rear two-thirds of the green of the short par-3 16th act as a huge punchbowl, not quite as big as Wagner & Hanse's 9th at Streamsong Black, but certainly a nod to it.
Wagner & Hanse took the template holes and concepts of C.B. Macdonald and Seth Raynor as inspiration, but used them more as jumping-off points than as guidelines. The only concrete homage to an existing hole comes at the aforementioned short 13th, "Postage Stamp," which invokes the original in a way that fits in with the rest of the course, but matches a slightly larger green with a back-tee yardage that is three to four clubs longer than its counterpart at Royal Troon.
Like many of the most striking new golf courses, Kinsale is a high-end private club, and it will be interesting to see how its reputation develops over time. Its location in the heart of the greater Naples market means it will inevitably be compared to the likes of Calusa Pines and Naples National as more golfers find their way on as guests. While I haven't yet played all of Florida's top layouts, I would easily place it in my top five private courses in the state alongside Seminole Golf Club, Mountain Lake, the Country Club of Florida and Pine Tree Golf Club, which Ben Hogan once called the greatest flat course he had ever seen. If he were alive today, I think Kinsale might make him think twice.
Comments (1)
This is one of the best articles I’ve read in GP over the past year. You’ve managed to capture the kind of alchemy that Hanse and Wagner achieved at Kinsale, combining a sense of history with a raft of cleverly crafted architectural features and refinements that have transformed a banal, flat piece of land into a remarkable layout. Most importantly, the look of the course remains relatively natural and basically haphazard-looking (entirely without any of the other features that lend a course geometric lines), perhaps especially so because many of the bunkers are hidden, so sharing a resemblance to links bunkers–whose origin and formation in coastal Scotland was generated by wind and animals. It’s interesting, then, that you don’t mention links (I don’t think) in this piece. But that is unnecessary, since the connection to early Long Island designs makes the connection implicit.
Your prediction that this course will be influential in the future seems entirely supported by the abundant evidence you provide–including a myriad of facets and reasons that fully explain the distinctiveness (but also the appeal) of its routing and its shot values, of its greens and bunkers.
If this contributes to the future of American golf in some way, that will be–to use your phrase–a cool golf thing.