Golf Course Architecture: Issue 57 - July 2019

62 member will feel like they have had all the thrills of this style of course, while being able to sometimes record a score they can be proud of. The course builds to a dramatic finish. The fifteenth is a long par three with an elevated back tee set into a wooded hillside. The green juts into one of the lakes, and there’s a stream to the right. The target feels very small and the smart shot for most golfers is probably to bounce it onto the green, rather than trying to fly it directly at the pin. The sixteenth is the first of the course’s two consecutive woodland holes, where the design team has used previous corridors but reversed the direction of play. A short uphill par four, the green is reachable but high risk, thanks to the stream that runs in front of the green on its way down the hillside. A high and pure drive will be required to hold the putting surface. Lundin was a bit concerned that the placement of a storage lake on the highest point of the course – the par-four seventeenth – would seem unnatural. But the lake here has soft edges rather than bulkheads and, with large amounts of exposed rock and lined by trees, the hole has a pleasant alpine character. Most players will try to lay up short of a stream that cuts across the fairway about 100 yards from a perched green, where anything missed right will fall a good ten feet below the putting surface. On the hillside to the left of that green, the back tees for the eighteenth provide a dramatic elevated setting for the final tee shot. The middle set of tees, also high above the fairway, provides a similarly special view and challenge, with bunkers and lake to negotiate. The closing hole wraps The sixteenth and seventeenth (pictured) holes are routed up and along a wooded hillside Photo: Peter Corden ÖSTERÅKER GOLFKLUBB