Twenty-five years ago, it was impossible to imagine the places people would now be rushing to for world class resort golf: the cold southwest coast of Oregon; the austere shore of the mighty St. Lawrence River in Nova Scotia; agrarian central Wisconsin; the quiet Ozarks of southern Missouri.

The golf resorts that have been developed in these remote locales are cut from a different cloth as those of our grandfathers—Bandon Dunes, Sand Valley and Gamble Sands are not The Breakers or Greenbriers or Broadmoors of old. The paradigm for the new destination golf is less hand-in-glove full service and more golf, golf and more golf, rounds upon rounds of it, with no need for additional hiking, swimming, boating, riding or white-linen dining.

Among the new wave of remote retreats, Streamsong in south-central Florida has become the premier winter destination for golf thrill-seekers. Built on a massive site where decades ago phosphate was mined, the three courses—Blue (by architect Tom Doak), Red (Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw) and Black (Gil Hanse and Jim Wagner)—possess deep sandy soil, large scale dune and spoil features and holes that interact with lagoons and other remnants of the mining operation. Each resides inside the top 30 of Golf Digest’s 100 Greatest Public Courses and in our America’s Second 100 Greatest ranking (which combines public and private). The opening last year of a new short course called The Chain means guests can play golf sun-up to sun-down.

Given Streamsong’s popularity, it still isn’t enough golf to meet demand—so the resort is announcing the addition of a new, yet-to-be-named 18-hole course by architect David McLay Kidd (you can bet it will be color-themed—the bet here is Streamsong White).

Watch our exclusive drone footage of the site of Streamsong’s new course:

(Drone footage by Will Fullerton)

For Kidd, creator of the original course at Bandon Dunes, all the courses at Gamble Sands, Mammoth Dunes at Sand Valley (all in the Golf Digest top 200) and most recently GrayBull in the Nebraska Sandhills, working at Streamsong has been a long time in the making.

“I’ve been chasing this my whole career, it feels like,” he says. “I was at the original opening of the Red and Blue in 2012 and talking (to the developers) then about the ‘next course.’ At one point I was trying to muscle in on what became the Black course. Streamsong just feels like the East Coast version of Bandon Dunes, and I really wanted to be part of the mix there. So I’m thrilled that eventually things seemed to have fallen into place.”

During the interview process, KemperSports, who manage Streamsong, asked several architects and firms to look at different parcels around the company’s vast holdings and develop concepts for the pieces of property they liked best. Kidd was ultimately drawn toward the landforms and opportunities of a section situated just southwest of the Red Course and bordering on holes four, eight and nine of the Black.

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“Red and Blue had exceptional sites and that is why they are the universally loved courses at Streamsong,” Kidd says. “Black gets a harder time because the site wasn’t quite as good and not as diverse, so Gil (Hanse) had to do things to make up for that.”

“I happen to think the site we’re working on is as good as Blue and Red,” he says. “It’s got big dunes, lots of diverse shapes, water, big uphill and downhill holes. It’s much more like the Red Course. That’s any architect’s dream. If you’re starting with a site that’s already a seven, eight or nine out of 10, your life is so much easier.”

Kidd’s parcel has ingredients similar to the two original courses, especially the section near the Red course where the mining remnants have left the most topographical variety and movement. Once the routing moves away from the beginning and ending points playing out and back to the Black clubhouse it settles into a broad savannah expanse with subtle grade changes aside from a low ridge near the sixth green and seventh tee.

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This includes a wide, flat basin that Kidd calls the “Hanse flats,” an area that Hanse’s team harvested for the sand they used to cap the Black course in the mid-2010s. Kidd will have to first fill in the basin by excavating sand from another site at Streamsong and transporting it in, then manufacture holes four, five and eight from pure imagination.

The character and concept of the holes in beginning and middle of the round is yet to be determined—all of these holes will have to be created—but the availability of sand and ability to dig into the soils make the options almost limitless. Kidd will have to do less with the final four holes that enter an attractive upland section of pines with canted land already suggests golf, cross a finger of lake and then ride atop a ridge that runs parallel to the third and fourth hole at the Red, tipping toward the lake on the right.

KemperSports CEO Steve Skinner says that Kidd’s plan immediately grabbed their attention, especially when he presented a plan that could play out of the Black clubhouse, removing the need to construct a new building elsewhere.

“We really responded to the land that David chose and the routing he came up with,” he says. “It was just a great use of the available ground, very creative and original with a lot of variety.”

“He’s also very competitive as a designer, and we know he’s going to channel that part of him into his course and come up with something that will be very bold and very exciting to play.”

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Will Fullerton

Streamsong was a unique endeavor because the original two courses were built simultaneously on the same piece of land by Doak and Coore with holes that were intertwined. Their teams could observe what the other was doing at any given time, and there were even tradeoffs of certain holes as the two routings were being charted.

When Hanse and Wagner came in several years later to build the Black, their goal was to create something very different than the Red and the Blue. The driving concept, incorporated almost by accident, was the borderless green, expanded areas of high contour flowing well beyond the perimeters of normal greens, all cut at putting surface height.

Kidd won’t purposefully try to set his course apart.

“I don’t feel the need to change the direction of the wind just for change. We’ll do what we’ve done over the last 15 years from Gamble Sands on and emphasize the playability and the ability to recover. It’s something that the golfing public really loves. But as far as a design change just to make it different, I don’t think there’s something out there that I’m going to try to inject artificially.”

“I think Red and Blue, and to a lesser degree Black, celebrate the sites they’re in and I don’t think we’ll be doing anything different,” he says. “We’ll be playing the same instruments, just with different music.”

Kidd’s crews will begin preliminary construction in February, and there’s no rush or timetable to complete the course. But when it’s finished, Streamsong will be the only property in the U.S. with courses by the “big four” of contemporary architecture, or at least the four most successful architects working in the mode of naturalism.

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“When we look back in 25 or 50 years on the Mount Rushmore of golf from this era, I think you’ll see Kidd, Coore, Doak and Hanse up there,” says KemperSports’ Skinner. “And at Streamsong we’ll be the only place to have courses from all of them.”

Added Kidd: “The whole goal is to make sure the next course is in the debate of which course is best, just like Bandon. We don’t need to build the undeniably best golf course at Streamsong, though of course that would be great, but we just need to be in the hunt and make people argue about it.”

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This article was originally published on golfdigest.com