SINGAPORE -- Singapore Island Country Club, one of Asia’s largest and most prestigious golfing addresses, has retained the course architects at Golfplan-Fream, Dale & Ramsey to comprehensively redesign 36 of the club’s 72 holes, beginning this fall.
Central to Golfplan’s charge is refurbishment of SICC’s Bukit Course, a James Braid design that, at one time or another, has hosted every important professional tournament in Asia, including the Johnnie Walker Classic and Singapore Open. Golfplan will re-infuse the venerated 1924 layout with a host of vintage Braid characteristics while adding tournament length and challenge.
“It’s clear the club is interested in re-establishing the Bukit Course as one of Asia’s premier tournament venues,” said Golfplan partner Kevin Ramsey. “Accordingly, this a primary goal of our renovation. To that end, we’re excited to employ some of the strategies we’ve developed and have proved successful at other tournament courses in Asia.”
From a championship preparation perspective, it’s no accident that Golfplan was chosen from a who’s who of architecture firms (among them, Greg Norman and Robert Trent Jones II) to handle the renovation work at Singapore Island Country Club. Golfplan designed and recently retooled the Serapong Course on the Island of Sentosa, which sits in Singapore Harbor. The Serapong is current host of the Barclay’s Singapore Open and was recently named the top tournament course in all of Asia by Asian Golf Monthly magazine.
Another Golfplan design, The Club at Nine Bridges in Korea, recently played host to the World Club Championship and has held numerous LPGA events, including the Samsung World Championship. Nine Bridges is now firmly ensconced on the world Top 100 lists at both Golf Digest and Golf Magazine.
Yet Golfplan partner David Dale acknowledged that far more is at stake with the SICC project. For starters, the firm will also completely overhaul and reimagine the club’s Sime Course, an 70-year-old 18 named for John Sime, who was club president in the 1920s when it was known as Royal Singapore Golf Club. While the Sime redesign will offer Golfplan a chance to essentially design a brand new golf course, the Bukit renovation will hew as closely as possible to the design intents of Mr. Braid, a Scot who lived from 1870 to 1950, won the British Open five times, and is responsible for the Kings and Queens courses at Gleneagles, St. Enodoc, Brora and Carnoustie, among myriad others.
“The Bukit is a course credited to Braid, whose work is rare in Asia,” Dale explained. “The tropical, fecund nature of the climate here and the extraordinary amount of play the Bukit has seen over the course of 80-odd years, has greatly diminished Braid’s influence. And let’s be clear: While the James Braid Society recognizes the Bukit as a fully fledged Braid design, the man never set foot on site. He laid out the course using boundary and topographical maps.
“Still, we intend to do what he would have done: bring the Braid character fully to bear in creating a highlands feel (something we did at Nine Bridges) in a unique tropical setting.”
Indeed, following a signing ceremony at SICC on April 19, Ramsey, Dale and several key members of the SICC Renovation Committee will embark on a 10-day tour of Braid-designed courses in England and Scotland, where they will identify and bone up on the Braid characteristics to be deployed on the Bukit Course. For Dale, it will be refresher course, as he indulged in a similar Braid-immersion trip prior to breaking ground at Nine Bridges.
Ramsey noted that extraordinary projects call for extraordinary measures. “It’s certainly no chore to play and study Braid courses across the breadth of Great Britain,” he said with a wry smile. “But the trip is an indication of how seriously we’re taking the restoration of the Bukit’s vintage features and design strategies.”
Golfplan-Fream, Dale & Ramsey are golf’s most cosmopolitan course designers, with projects now in some stage of development in 11 different countries worldwide. Since its formation in 1973, by founding partner Ron Fream, the firm has built some of the world’s most celebrated courses, in some of golf’s most exotic locations: Pezula, on South African cliffs overlooking the Indian Ocean; Bali Handara and Jagorawi, in the tropical jungles of Indonesia; Shore Gate, in the storied sand hills just a few miles from Pine Valley and the boardwalks of Atlantic City, New Jersey, in the United States; the 27 holes at Disneyland Paris; and the mountainous Bonari Kogen GC, Japan’s top-rated resort course.
Dale and Ramsey are based out of Golfplan’s U.S. headquarters in Santa Rosa, Calif., while the famously globetrotting Fream now operates a satellite office from his home in Johor Boru, just over the border from Singapore in Malaysia.
Citing the project’s scope, significance and demanding schedules, Dale explained that all three Golfplan partners will be on site during portions of the renovation, which will be conducted in four 9-hole phases to insure that 27 holes are open to SICC’s membership at all times. To speed things along and guard against erosion in rain-soaked Singapore, Dale expects that each new nine — follow reconstruction — will be sodded in its entirety.
[For more information on this and other projects from Golfplan-Fream, Dale & Ramsey, call +1.207.526.7190, or visit www.golfplan.com]
