For the avid golfer, Melbourne’s south-eastern suburbs might best be described as paradise. From the world famous Sandbelt layouts to the spectacular fairways of the Mornington Peninsula, the region has a plethora of outstanding courses seemingly at every turn.
One of the impressive recent additions to the eastern edge of the Sandbelt is the Sandhurst Club – a 36-hole private golf complex just 35 minutes’ drive from the CBD.
It is nearly 21 years since the idea for Sandhurst was conceived and over the following years the plan morphed into a project that would see the creation of a new master-planned residential community, with two championship-standard golf courses, clubhouse, training facility. and a permanent home for the PGA of Australia at its hub. Ambitious … yes. Impossible … no.
Today, most of the surrounding real estate has been sold, the PGA is entrenched and both Peter Thomson and Ross Perrett-designed layouts – known as the North and Champions courses – are continuing to evolve as fine challenges for players of all abilities.
With five-time British Open champion Thomson having such strong ties and a love of golf in Scotland, it should not come as any surprise that a course bearing his the name might, in some part, pay homage to the great links of the Home of Golf. The North course does just that.
It is a layout that closely follows Thomson’s philosophy of design, which comes from the traditional links-style courses of Scotland where the belief is that golf is a game played along the ground, not in the air.
There was high expectation attached to the project, given the new layout’s proximity to the Melbourne Sandbelt and the finest courses in the land. With the aid of modern construction equipment, computer-aided design and a lot of imagination, Thomson and Perrett were successfully able to turn degraded cow pastures into rolling links land.
