Desmond Muirhead

Desmond Muirhead, born Gordon Desmond Muirhead on March 23, 1923 in Norwich, England, was a golf course architect who spent most of his working life in the United States. After Cambridge he read landscape architecture at the University of British Columbia in Canada and at the University of Oregon. He is usually introduced as a landscape architect and town planner first and a golf course architect second, a man with a deep interest in art and in the cultures of the places he worked in. He died on May 2, 2002 in Newport Beach, California, at the age of 79.

He came to golf design in the early 1960s, and his first commission is said to have been the par-3 course built at the Disneyland Hotel in Anaheim, California, which opened in 1961 and no longer exists. Through the 1960s and 1970s he laid out large residential developments built around a golf course, and he is credited with coining the term golf course community. The thinking behind it was that the course should set the shape of the town, rather than be fitted into whatever the housing left over. The two best-known works of that period are the Dinah Shore Tournament Course at Mission Hills Country Club in California and Muirfield Village Golf Club in Ohio. The latter, designed with Jack Nicklaus and opened in 1974, is known as the home of the Memorial Tournament.

From the middle of the 1980s Muirhead went in an entirely different direction. He took myth, legend, symbol and fantasy as his subject matter, and began to build holes as works in their own right. At Stone Harbor Golf Club in New Jersey, commissioned in 1987, every hole was given a mythological name — Pegasus, Jupiter, Prometheus — and the ninth traced the geography of the region, with a green in the shape of the state of New Jersey and bunkers modelled on Manhattan. The par 3 ringed by water, called Clashing Rocks, was softened into a gentler shape within a few years. At Aberdeen in Florida he built a hole that reads as a mermaid from the air. Opinion on this work is divided: Golf Digest allowed him the boldness of drawing on art, literature and nature, but judged that the fish bunkers and the mermaid hole went too far.

Among the courses listed on GoGolf, three are Muirhead designs, one in Indonesia and two in Thailand, and all three can be booked through GoGolf. Imperial Klub Golf in Indonesia is laid out around island-like fairways and greens, the fourth, Pulua, and the fifth, Temple, being the clearest examples. St Andrews 2000 Golf Club in Rayong province, Thailand, holds two par 6s, the 700-yard fourth and the 910-yard 13th, which gives the course the unusual total of par 74. The Emerald Golf Club, also in Rayong, is credited to Muirhead together with Nick Faldo and Douglas Nichols in 1995.

Muirhead courses you can book on GoGolf

• Imperial Klub Golf (Tangerang, Indonesia) — 18 holes at Lippo Karawaci. Island-like fairways and greens one after another, Muirhead through and through
• St Andrews 2000 Golf Club (Rayong, Thailand) — a par 74 with two par 6s, set out over sharply rolling hills
• The Emerald Golf Club (Rayong, Thailand) — a par 72 opened in 1995. A wooded course credited to Muirhead with Nick Faldo and others

Tee times and rates for a given day can be checked on each course page or in the GoGolf app.

See the other golf course architects here.