There's something counterintuitive happening at some of the most prestigious golf clubs in America. They're spending millions of dollars — sometimes tens of millions — not to modernize, not to add length, not to install new irrigation systems or build fancy practice facilities. They're spending it to undo things. To rip out bunkers that were added in the 1960s. To shrink greens back to dimensions that haven't existed since Eisenhower was in office. To plant grass varieties that would have been familiar to players seventy years ago.
The golf course restoration movement is no longer a niche interest among architecture nerds. It's the dominant trend in high-end American golf, and the list of courses going through it reads like a who's-who of the game's most revered venues.
Seminole Is the Headline, but It's Not the Only Story
Right now, the most talked-about restoration project in golf is at Seminole Golf Club in Juno Beach, Florida. Gil Hanse and Jim Wagner — the same team behind the renovation of Winged Foot, Merion, and Los Angeles Country Club's North Course — are overseeing a comprehensive effort to unwind changes made over the decades and recover Donald Ross's original 1929 design.
The scope is enormous. Every green, bunker, fairway, and tee is being rebuilt. Greens are being expanded by more than 36,000 square feet in total, returning usable hole locations that had been lost to decades of gradual shrinkage. Fairways are being raised through sandcapping to restore the firm, fast playing surfaces Ross intended. The work is being done in two phases — front nine in the summer of 2025, back nine in 2026 — with the fully restored course expected to be ready for members later this year.
But Seminole is just one project in a long and growing list. Andrew Green rebuilt East Lake from the ground up using a 1949 aerial photograph as his guide. Ron Forse has completed over 120 restorations, including 55 Donald Ross designs. Keith Foster's overhaul of Philadelphia Cricket Club was so transformative it vaulted the course from 400th to 32nd in national rankings. Oakland Hills, Oak Hill, Congressional, Southern Hills — championship venues that once represented the cutting edge of golf — are all paying to go backwards.
What Changed in the First Place?
To understand why restoration is booming, you have to understand what happened to these courses over the previous sixty years.
The era from roughly the 1950s through the 1990s was defined by a particular philosophy: modernize. Courses were lengthened to keep up with advancing equipment. Bunkers were reshaped into uniform, cookie-cutter ovals because they were easier to maintain. Trees were planted everywhere — along fairways, behind greens, in places the original architects specifically left open — because lush greenery looked good on television and matched the aesthetic sensibilities of the era.
The result, at many clubs, was a slow-motion identity crisis. Courses designed by Ross, Tillinghast, MacKenzie, and Thomas — architects who prized strategy, natural ground movement, and creative options off the tee — were gradually flattened into target-golf exercises. Wide fairways were narrowed by trees. Green complexes with subtle internal contours were simplified or rebuilt. Bunkers that once demanded creative recovery shots became cosmetic features with no strategic purpose.
Most of this happened gradually enough that nobody noticed. A few trees planted here. A green rebuilt there. By the time anyone looked up, the course barely resembled what its architect had intended.
Restoration vs. Renovation: The Philosophical Divide
Here's where it gets interesting — and where opinions start to diverge.
A true restoration is based on historical research. Original construction plans, early aerial photographs, newspaper articles, correspondence from the architect, survey data. The goal is to understand what the designer actually built and why, then recover that intent as faithfully as possible. Ron Forse has described it as archaeological work. You're not just rebuilding features — you're trying to understand a mind.
A renovation, by contrast, is a comprehensive rebuild that may reference history but isn't bound by it. Andrew Green's work at East Lake is the most telling example. The $30 million project reconstructed every feature on the course, regrassed fairways and greens with modern turf varieties, and stretched the layout to 7,455 yards. It used a historical photograph as a starting point, but the finished product is a modern golf course built with modern materials and modern infrastructure. As one architecture writer put it: "If we call the East Lake project a 'restoration,' we've drained the word of its meaning."
Most projects today fall somewhere in between — what some in the industry call "restorvation." You recover the original architect's routing, green shapes, and strategic intent, but you also address modern realities like drainage, irrigation, and the fact that today's best players hit it 50 yards farther than the players who first walked those fairways.
Gil Hanse, who is arguably the busiest and most influential figure in this space, has described his approach as developing a vision that retains the intent of the original architect while "intentionally bringing the course forward into the future." That's a diplomatic way of saying you can't fully go back — but you should at least understand what you're departing from.
Why Now?
Several forces converged to create this moment.
First, there's genuine architectural scholarship that didn't exist thirty years ago. Organizations like the Donald Ross Society — formed specifically in response to what they saw as egregious alterations to Ross designs — helped create a culture of preservation. Digital tools like LIDAR surveying and aerial photography databases made it possible to research original designs with a precision that earlier generations couldn't have imagined.
Second, golf's post-pandemic boom brought money. Clubs that had deferred maintenance for years suddenly had full membership rosters and waiting lists. If you're going to spend millions on course work anyway, the thinking went, why not do it right?
Third — and this is the one nobody wants to say out loud — the tree-planting era produced some genuinely bad golf. Courses that were meant to play firm and fast played soft and slow. Fairways that were designed to offer multiple angles of approach turned into narrow chutes. Strategic par-4s became mindless driver-wedge holes because trees eliminated the option of playing away from trouble. The restoration movement is, in part, a belated admission that the previous generation got it wrong.
What This Means If You're Not a Member at Seminole
For the average golfer, the restoration movement might seem irrelevant. You're not playing Seminole or Oakland Hills. You might never set foot on a Donald Ross course.
But the philosophy behind restoration is filtering down, and it's changing how golf courses at every level think about design. The shift away from penal, narrow, tree-lined corridors and toward wider fairways with strategic bunkering is happening at public courses too. The idea that a golf hole should present choices rather than dictate a single correct play is becoming mainstream. Green complexes are getting more interesting again — architects are building in internal contours, false fronts, and collection areas instead of flat, receptive surfaces that reward nothing but distance.
More practically, if you're someone who plays a Golden Age course that hasn't been restored yet, understanding what was originally there can change how you see it. Those trees squeezed into the fairway at the 130-yard mark? The original architect probably didn't put them there. That bunker that seems to be in a weird spot? It might have made perfect sense when the green was twenty feet wider. The course you're playing may be a palimpsest — layers of changes obscuring something more interesting underneath.
The Tension at the Heart of It
The restoration movement isn't without its critics. Some argue that fixating on the past limits creative thinking — that today's architects should be free to bring their own vision rather than serving as caretakers of someone else's. Others point out that true restoration is impossible when the game itself has changed so fundamentally. You can rebuild Ross's greens to their original dimensions, but you can't unbuild the modern golf ball.
These are legitimate objections. But the counterargument is simpler and, I think, more persuasive: the original architects were usually right. Ross, Tillinghast, MacKenzie, and their contemporaries understood ground movement, strategy, and the relationship between risk and reward at a level that most of their successors didn't match. When clubs spend millions to recover those original designs, they almost universally end up with better golf courses.
That's not nostalgia. That's just recognizing good work.
