Paul Jansen

Paul Jansen is a golf course architect who was born in Zimbabwe and grew up in South Africa. He went to Durban Boys’ High School and in 1999 took an honours degree in town and regional planning at the University of the Witwatersrand. After graduating he went to the United States and learned the practical side of course design at Ault, Clark and Associates. In 2000 he moved to Europe and joined Nick Faldo‘s design team, where he was lead architect on projects around the world. His working life has taken him from one site to the next across the United States, Europe, Africa and Asia.

After basing himself at Chancy in Switzerland in 2008, he founded his own practice, Jansen Golf Design, in 2010 and shifted the centre of his work to North America. He now lives in Toronto, Canada and belongs to both the ASGCA and the EIGCA. Meeting the short-game teacher Dave Pelz in Texas in 2016 was a turning point, and took his work into artificial-turf design and golf entertainment. He went into partnership with the Pelz group in 2018 and with the PGA and LPGA coach Gareth Raflewski in 2019. He is now founder and CEO of Himalayas Golf, where his stated aim is to build golf courses that are enjoyable to play, sustainable, and viable as a business, all at once. He has written two books, Golf: Sustainable by Design and Driving Change: Artificial Turf’s Influence on Golf, and argues the case for the short game from the fact that roughly 75 percent of all golf shots are played from within 125 yards of the green.

In Asia he has been involved with the three Laguna courses at the Banyan Tree resorts: Laguna Lang Co in central Vietnam, Laguna Golf Phuket in Thailand and Laguna Golf Bintan in Indonesia. None of them was a new build; each was a matter of reworking a course that was already there. The trade magazine Golf Course Architecture reported in December 2014 that work was under way at Laguna Phuket to reduce bunkering and maintained turf, and in January 2015 that the course had reopened after Jansen’s remodelling. As one would expect of an architect who puts sustainability first, the changes were made in a direction that lightened the burden of maintaining the course itself.

Among the courses listed on GoGolf, Jansen renovated two, in Thailand and Indonesia, and both can be booked through GoGolf. Laguna Golf Phuket, on the west coast of Phuket island in Thailand, opened in 1993 as a par 71 and was built on the site of a former tin mine. According to its GoGolf course page, the 2014 renovation added steps and hollows in the fairways and mounding to what had been a flat layout, turning it into a course with real strategy. Laguna Golf Bintan on Bintan island in Indonesia is a Greg Norman design, and Top100Golfcourses records that the first phase of a major renovation was completed by Jansen in 2016, with Nick Faldo performing the reopening ceremony on November 4 that year. The work widened the fairways, rebuilt all 18 greens and reconsidered where the bunkers sat.

Courses renovated by Jansen that you can book on GoGolf

• Laguna Golf Phuket (Phuket, Thailand) — a par 71 opened in 1993 on the site of a tin mine. Renovated in 2014 and reopened in January 2015
• Laguna Golf Bintan (Bintan, Indonesia) — a Greg Norman design on the coast. The first phase of the renovation was completed in 2016

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.