Kyle Phillips

Kyle Phillips is a golf course architect, born in 1958 at Atlanta in Georgia. He read landscape architecture at Kansas State University and graduated in 1981 with a national award from the American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA). In the same year he joined the California office of Robert Trent Jones Jr., and he stayed there sixteen years, until 1997, rising from design associate to vice-president.

The work he took in those years lay mainly in Europe and the Caribbean: Penha Longa in Portugal, The Wisley in England, Saint Donat in France, Royal Westmoreland in Barbados. Between jobs he went back again and again to the links and heathland courses of Britain and Ireland to see for himself how the old courses used the ground they had been given, and he has said that this is what settled the way he works. In 1997 he set up on his own and founded Kyle Phillips Golf Course Design at Granite Bay in California.

The job that came to him almost at once was Kingsbarns Golf Links in Scotland. Mark Parsinen, the developer he had worked with at Granite Bay Golf Club in California, invited him over, and from November 1997 he set about farmland on the North Sea coast some seven miles from St Andrews. Golf had been played on that ground on and off since the eighteenth century, but it had closed during the Second World War and had stayed closed ever since. The course opened in July 2000, and the contours, which look as though they had always been there, and the views of the sea brought it a name in short order. From 2001 it became one of the venues for the Alfred Dunhill Links Championship, and in 2017 it staged the Women’s British Open.

His work since has spread to more than thirty countries on five continents. There are The Grove in England, Dundonald Links in Scotland, Bernardus Golf in the Netherlands (2018), PGA Sweden National, Yas Links in the United Arab Emirates (2010), Al Maaden and Tazegzout in Morocco, and South Cape Owners Club in Korea (2013); in the United States he remodelled the California Golf Club of San Francisco (2014), and in France he restored Morfontaine. In South East Asia he designed Stonehill, outside Bangkok in Thailand. Phillips holds that the character of a course should be drawn from the landform the site already has and from the history of the place, and that where there is no feature worth the name, the architect should build ground that looks as though there is.

See the other golf course architects here.