Tom Fazio

Tom Fazio, in full Thomas Fazio, is a golf course architect, born on February 10, 1945 at Norristown in Pennsylvania. He grew up in a golfing family outside Philadelphia, but he never studied design at university. In 1962, at the age of seventeen, he went to work on the sites of his uncle George Fazio, by then established as an architect, and learned the trade by helping with the construction. Taking in the practical side of the work first, the earthmoving and the soils, the planting and the estimating, before ever coming to drawings, became the foundation of everything he did afterwards.

In 1972 he set up a design office of his own at Jupiter, Florida. He made his reputation with Wild Dunes in South Carolina (1979) and The Vintage Club in California (1980), and went on to PGA National Resort in Florida (1980) and Lake Nona Golf & Country Club, also in Florida (1986). What made his name for good was Shadow Creek at Las Vegas, Nevada, built with the casino operator Steve Wynn. On flat desert ground he brought in contour, water and tens of thousands of trees to make a landscape shut off from everything around it, a world of its own; the course opened in 1989 (some sources give 1990) and became his calling card. His approach rests on letting the conditions of the land and the owner’s priorities decide the shape, rather than applying a philosophy settled in advance. What decides whether a course is good, he has said, is width rather than length.

Alongside new courses he has done a great deal of remodelling and advisory work at established clubs. Since the late 1990s he has been consulting architect to Augusta National Golf Club in Georgia, and has been closely involved in the changes to the stage of the Masters, among them the rebuilding of the 7th and the 11th. He has worked continuously at Quail Hollow Club in North Carolina since 1997, and has been making changes at Pine Valley Golf Club in New Jersey over many years. Outside the United States there are Adare Manor in Ireland (remodelled in 2015) and Corales Golf Club in the Dominican Republic (2010).

He has worked on more than 200 courses, of which 46 are said to stand in Golf Digest’s list of America’s 200 best. Three times he has been chosen as that magazine’s Best Modern Day Golf Course Architect, and in 1995 he became the second architect to receive the Old Tom Morris Award, given by the Golf Course Superintendents Association of America (GCSAA). In 2000 he published Golf Course Designs, written with Cal Brown, setting out his thinking on design. The firm is passing to the family: his son T. Logan Fazio is president, and his nephew Tom Fazio II works as an architect as well. He turned 80 in 2025 and is still at work, with projects in Italy and Dubai as well as in the United States.

See the other golf course architects here.