PASSIONATE by DESIGN
Peter Thomson’s prolific career as a golf course architect spanned five decades working on more than 250 projects, including 100 new courses, in 30 countries across five continents. Here, in this edited article from a series of interview features with Golf Australia magazine between 2004 and 2013, he talks about his love for the art of design, some of his philosophies and what makes a great golf course.
Peter Thomson had won four of his five British Opens when he took his first paying job as a golf course designer working with British architect Commander John Harris.
That year was 1964 and Thomson went on to collaborate with Harris on more than 70 projects throughout the world until the mid-1970s.
During his years with Harris, Thomson worked alongside another Englishman, Mike Wolveridge, who had played on the US Tour for several years. When Harris died in 1976, Thomson and Wolveridge formed their own partnership.
The boom in golf course construction that gripped Australia and south-east Asia during the mid-1980s kept Thomson and Wolveridge busy creating dozens of layouts. Business continued to thrive, especially in the area of resort course developments, and in 1988 Thomson and Wolveridge invited Ross Perrett, an architect and landscape architect, to join the team. The company expanded three years later and became known as Thomson Wolveridge & Perrett.
The firm later became known as Thomson Perrett – after the departure of Michael Wolveridge in 2003 – with seven oces around the world. As the company continued to grow, Thomson very much remained the patriarch of the firm until his retirement in 2015.
The firm’s Australian projects are particularly well known. Names like Links Hope Island, Twin Waters, Tura Beach, Alice Springs, Capital, Club Mandalay, The Sandhurst Club courses, Black Bull, Hamilton Island, The National’s Ocean course and Moonah Links’ Open layout are forever linked to Thomson.
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You have been involved in golf course design now for nearly half a century. In fact, you started designing while still playing at the highest levels in the game. Was it a natural progression for you to go from player to designer?
Yes. Actually when I was a young amateur at Royal Park (in Melbourne), about 15 or 16-yearsold, I planned another nine holes for the course.
There was space in those times before the sports ovals were built outside the zoo entrance. I wanted to pinch a bit of that land and enlarge the nine-hole Royal Park into 18.
So you were a designer in waiting?
Born (laughs). There was passion for course design very early on. In me there is kind of an artistic creativeness. I’ve always had that. I’ve dabbled in sketching and painting and things like that. I find designing is an art form, it is sculpture on a grand scale … sculpture in earth.
Has your method of designing golf courses changed over the years?
Basically, yes. The computer has made some dierence to the ideas flow. Computers prepare the maps and they do a beautiful job making them look impressive. But still the brain work is the same.
Really, I think as time has gone by we have had enough tasks on really poor land that we are quite good at producing a good result on a lousy bit of land. It’s very easy to get a good result on a brilliant piece of land, like links land for example.
But designing on really good land has its problems too, like overdoing the design, doesn’t it?
Yes, that’s true but it is easier to produce something that is stunning on a piece of links land than it is on a dead flat plain of alluvial soil and a bit of salt mixed in.
Naturally as one gets older and more experienced we’re not quite as daring and, perhaps, o the track, as we were in the beginning. We’ve made some terrible mistakes but that is part of the living.
Is it true to say that with each course you design you learn something new?
Yes, that’s true. You don’t learn something new about the game but more about building and creating.
With your years of experience, can you look back at some design elements you incorporated 20 or 30 years ago and do you think to yourself ‘I’ll never do that again’?
I’ve become a student of bunkers and I have a collection of a thousand or more (drawings and photographs) in my computer. I actually want to write a book about bunkers because they come in such varied sizes and shapes.
I am totally against large, gaping bunkers. If you look across the length and breadth of Britain you can’t find a big bunker. There’s a couple at St Andrews that are quite weird but that’s historical.
We, in Melbourne for instance, have a passion for huge, craterous bunkers where you take 10 paces to your ball. I find that anathema. All the bunkers that I do are smaller and it takes two steps to get to your ball, which means you’ve got two steps to tidy up as you get out so the bunkers
PEBBLE BEACH, I THINK IS A VERY, VERY ORDINARY GOLF COURSE AND IT IS USUALLY IN LOUSY CONDITION. – PETER THOMSON
keep themselves tidy. I like to make two or three bunkers where there might have been one big one.
We also have another passion for sweeping the sand right up to the sharp-edged rim of the bunker. This is completely Melbourne. You can’t find that in all of Britain, or America for that matter. Nobody sharpens the edge of bunkers anymore but we do it with great passion here in Melbourne and I don’t like it. I’ve learned not to like it.
Bunkers generally begin to expand if they are cut on the edge. Every time a greenkeeper cuts around the edge of a bunker with a spade, you lose half an inch o the bunker. Melbourne bunkers, generally speaking, over my lifetime, have expanded. Victoria, Royal Melbourne and Metropolitan all have bunkers that are bigger than they once were. Looking at your resume of Australian courses, you have designed layouts in most corners of the country. What are the main di erences between creating a course in the tropics and one on the Mornington Peninsula in Victoria?
The weather! (laughs) Seriously, you have got to be prepared for torrential downpours in tropical areas so you have got to have drainage ready to take care of that. That’s costly. Building a course in The Cups land on the Mornington Peninsula you don’t need drainage and this can save you a few million dollars.
If you build at Port Douglas, or in Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, you have got to have very elaborate drains … big diameter drains and that is a huge expense. What do you see as the greatest challenge now for golf course designers, apart from the obvious arguments about golf club and ball technologies?
Few courses can be built now without a real estate component. The cost of the land and building the course is such that you can’t get that money back by selling green fee tickets.
The real estate component means urban planning needs to be considered and the project has to be of a size where there is a large profit at the end because it is a risk for a developer to do such a thing. In your opinion what makes a great golf course?
A course must have a golf component, which is not a ‘wow’ component. Landscape architects that are doing golf courses are producing a look. Something that looks stunning and imposing and the golf side is missed. You don’t often find a course architect that is mainly obsessed with the golf element of design.
The best golf courses in the world are not photogenic. The golf part is sort of hidden … subtle, not sticking in your face. I once had someone tell me that all bunkers should be sticking up looking at you but he had obviously never been to St Andrews. That was a silly idea, but he was a landscaper.