What's happening at European Golf Design
We’re currently working, on a geographical basis, from the Caribbean to India. The construction work at Kittitian Hill in St Kitts is nearing completion – Gary was on site last week and with the help of near-legendary shaper/project manager Bob Harrington and the unlimited passion and involvement of developer, Val Kempadoo, it’s shaping up to be a quite beautiful course. For more information on Val’s philosophy and approach to the project, take a look at the project web site, which is inspirational: www.kittitianhill.com. Gary is finishing up the project in Marrakech which opens next month and is also involved in the new project in Dubai for Emaar at their Dubai Hills development. It’s fair to say this has been a fast-track project – design didn’t start until September while machines rolled on to site early in January to start the bulk earthworks.
As well as his work at the JCB project in the UK and Plages des Nations in Morocco, Rob is currently working on master planning with Vatika Group and U+A Studios on a beach site near Puducherry in southeastern India which will feature golf, a limited number of villas (most of which will have sea views) and a boutique hotel. It’s not often one is presented with 80Ha of beachfront property to work with – even less often when the property is absolutely untouched by previous development of any kind. He’s also involved with a project in North Cyprus for an Istanbul based development group.
Dave is spending most of this time on the 36 holes planned for Bodrum in Turkey. Dogus Grubu, one of the largest companies in Turkey, has bought an existing course, with additional land already zoned for development. Our brief is to deliver a resort-friendly course and a longer, more challenging tournament venue, effectively starting from scratch. IMG will be developing a sports academy on site, in addition to the ubiquitous residential and hotel elements which are being designed by WATG. When he’s not concentrating on that, Dave’s working on our long-standing project at King Abdullah Economic City in Saudi Arabia which, after a hiatus of several years, has recommenced with construction due to start again in the very near future.
From the middle east, we move to Russia and, more specifically, the city of White Nights – St Petersburg – where Ross (between meetings for his project in Manchester) is putting the finishing touches to the detailed design package for a course on the southeastern edge of the city. If you’ve never been, it is a beautiful city but suffers from horrendous traffic problems (as does Moscow) which means getting from A to B can take an inordinate amount of time, but once you’re there… The site is relatively flat, but possesses a magic ingredient in that the soils are a wonderfully pure sand. As the client wants to develop a family friendly project with many different leisure facilities, we (along with WATG who are working on this one too) are creating a lake with a total area of around 50Ha (not far short of the size of an average golf course) which will be used for boating, swimming and so on in the summer, and skating in the winter. All of the excavated material is being used to raise the remainder of the site out of the flood plain. Everyone’s a winner.
Beyond that, Matt is hugely busy with tournament planning for the European Tour’s staging team, in addition to the web site work he does for various players, and his production responsibilities for us. Alex is keeping the production work on schedule, as well as being a house-dad this month to his two young boys – he did suggest after the first couple of days that he couldn’t see what all the fuss about child care was all about…he’s been less vocal as the month has continued! Shara takes care of everything else – she’s been through our annual financial audit, helping me prepare for Board meetings with our shareholders, preparing month-end accounts and generally keeping the office ticking over with her normal (extraordinary) level of efficiency. And I’ve been out and about talking with new and existing clients. Without wishing to tempt fate, it seems that things have picked up across many regions and confidence has returned sufficiently that legitimate people are moving ahead with legitimate projects – if there has been anything good to come out of the past five years, it is that it’s acted as the biggest ‘idiot filter’ in living memory: the time-wasters have disappeared from the marketplace and long may that continue!