David McLay Kidd

David McLay Kidd is a golf course architect, born on June 20, 1967 at Johnstone in Renfrewshire, Scotland. His father, Jimmy Kidd, was a greenkeeper who went from Glasgow Golf Club to run the courses at Gleneagles, the great Scottish resort. Growing up with the work of a golf course as an everyday matter led straight into the profession. He read horticulture and landscape at Writtle College in Essex, England, learned the practical side of construction with the firm Southern Golf, spent a period at the design practice Swan Golf Designs, and in 1991 joined the development arm of Gleneagles.

The turn came in 1994, when the American businessman Mike Keiser named Kidd — then twenty-seven, and with no body of work behind him — as the architect of a course he was planning on the Pacific coast of Oregon. This was Bandon Dunes. Laid out on dunes above the sea in the manner of a Scottish links, it opened in May 1999 and set going the run of links-style resorts in America. Kidd himself has looked back on it and said that he had no record worth showing, and that he still does not really understand why Keiser chose him. On the strength of that success he set up his own firm, DMK Golf Design, which is now based at Bend in Oregon.

The work that followed includes Queenwood Golf Club in England (2001), Nanea Golf Club in Hawaii (2003), TPC Stonebrae in California (2007), The Castle Course at St Andrews in Scotland (2008), Tetherow in Oregon (2008) and Machrihanish Dunes on the west coast of Scotland (2009). His reach is wide, and he has left courses in Nepal, Fiji, Nicaragua and South Africa as well.

His early courses, with their bold shaping and demanding greens, divided opinion. In the first half of the 2010s Kidd changed his own thinking, keeping the drama of the look but turning towards making the golf as playable as it could be. As he puts it himself, playability and difficulty are not the two ends of a balance: a course can play very easily and still be quite enough of a test. What came out of that change was Gamble Sands in Washington State (2014), Mammoth Dunes at Sand Valley in Wisconsin (2017) and GrayBull in Nebraska (2024), all of them well regarded for their broad fairways and their greens of large, rolling movement. In recent years he has been at work on Loraloma in Texas.

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