A sight for square eyes at Michigan’s Arcadia Bluffs
Below are excerpts from an article that originally appeared in Golf Course Architecture.
Star developer Mike Keiser’s most famous insight into what makes golf resorts successful is his pithy comment: “One course is a curiosity, but two makes a destination.” And it is pretty obvious that, if you want golfers to travel a considerable distance to your property and stay for several days, to have more than eighteen holes to offer is a huge help. However good a course might be, variety is the spice of life. One would not necessarily get bored playing Pacific Dunes over and over again for a week, but the appeal of having Bandon Dunes, Bandon Trails and Old Macdonald to choose from can’t be denied.
At the Arcadia Bluffs resort on the eastern shore of Lake Michigan, they’ve spent much of the last two decades trying to prove that Keiser’s line is not true. And they have done a pretty good job. In a typical year, the lakefront course designed by Warren Henderson and Phil Smith plays host to over 25,000 rounds of golf, a remarkable number for a venue so far north and with a correspondingly short season. It’s true that northern Michigan is something of a Mecca for golf, with Alistair MacKenzie’s legendary Crystal Downs less than half an hour away, and Mike De Vries’ acclaimed Kingsley Club not that much further. Both these courses are private, but there’s no doubt that quite a lot of Arcadia Bluffs guests pay them – and others – a visit when they’re in the area. Nevertheless, the Bluffs is unarguably one of the most successful golf resorts in America, evidenced by the construction, in the last eighteen months, of a second lodge, with 16 extra guest rooms.
So no-one can be particularly surprised that owner Rich Postma should choose to build a second course. But getting the right second course isn’t entirely straightforward. You want to do something different from your first offering, but to change too radically risks making your guests wonder why the two are connected. And when the property for the second course is pretty dramatically different from the first, that problem is intensified.
At Arcadia Bluffs, to replicate the first course in any sense was not an option. Henderson and Smith’s design is to any normal course what a blockbuster action movie is to Brief Encounter. It fronts onto Lake Michigan at the top of the bluffs for which the place is named, and the earthmoving has created enormous faux dunes and deep, steep sided valleys through which the holes run. It is hugely popular, exciting and entertaining, but if what Bill Coore and Tom Doak do is minimalism, then this is maximalism writ large. No orthodox course could possibly out bluff the Bluffs, especially as the site chosen for the second is a mile or so inland from the existing property.
Yet, in its own way, the new South course at Arcadia Bluffs, designed by architect Dana Fry, is just as radical as its predecessor. The property is just about all sand – as is the case for so much of northern Michigan – and what Fry and his team have done with it looks like nothing most of its guests will ever have seen before.
Last summer, a few photos started to leak out on social media and elsewhere on the internet, to a reaction of ‘What the #$@&! is that?’ from incredulous viewers. The first word that springs to the mind of anyone who sees pictures of Arcadia South is ‘square’. For what Fry has built is a love letter to Chicago Golf Club, one of the oldest clubs in America, possessor of a CB Macdonald/Seth Raynor course that, although rarely seen by outsiders (the club’s membership is tiny and a guest invite is among the most highly sought-after tickets in golf), is universally regarded as among the world’s finest.
Click here to read the full article on golfcoursearchitecture.net.