Two Brians, one architecture firm

Veteran golf course architect Brian Silva invited longtime colleague Brian Johnson to partner in a new design firm, Silva & Johnson, Ltd., whose roots, ethos and client list each reach back to the golden age of course design.

“More than 40 years ago, Geoffrey Cornish — who got his start as an agronomist working for Stanley Thompson in the 1930s — extended to me the same sort of partnership opportunity,” Silva said. “I’ve worked alongside Brian Johnson for 25 years now. He’s as good a strategist as there is working today, but I might not have recommended this move 10 or 15 years ago. There wasn’t enough work out there. Today there is.

“This move means Brian, who brings so much to the table, can really spread his wings — and we can accept commissions that previously did not make sense, not for a lone ranger with grandkids. I’m excited to pass the torch while there’s still time to work together in earnest.”

Three high-profile renovations — what the new partners prefer to term “transformations” — will dominate the 2026 calendar. In December, Silva & Johnson broke ground at San Antonio Country Club, laid out 112 years ago by Alex Findlay. A.W. Tillinghast revamped SACC during the 1930s and Silva executed equally sweeping work there in 2005. He and the Houston-based Johnson return to complete it this winter.

The new partners are already underway on a similarly comprehensive refurbishment at 27-hole Old Westbury Golf & Country Club (William Mitchell / Gil Hanse) on Long Island. In the spring, they will begin the transformation of Boca Raton Golf & Country Club (Donald Ross / William Flynn) on the East Coast of Florida.

Johnson, 48, has been working with Silva since 2009, providing hole strategies, AutoCad plan production, grading and drainage development, turf specifications and the detailed hole renderings that enable the master plan process. As such, he worked closely with Silva in developing those master plans soon to be realized at San Antonio and Old Westbury, along with dozens of others from the golden age that Silva has revitalized and transformed.

“Brian has been a such a generous mentor to me through the years,” Johnson said. “He and his partners gave me my first job in the design business, but the last 15 years have been different. It’s been a privilege and education to see how he has planned and executed the renovation work at places like Seth Raynor’s Country Club of Charleston, the Ross courses at Interlachen and Brookside, in Canton, Ohio, and original designs like The Renaissance Club and Great Horse in Massachusetts.

“To be out front a bit more, as a lead designer and partner, is pretty much a dream come true.”

In 2001, Silva and his partners at Cornish, Silva & Mungeam did indeed hire Johnson and his landscape architecture degree fresh out Iowa State University. Four years later, the young associate joined Houston-based Jacobsen Hardy Course Design, where he worked on original projects like Brasada Ranch near Bend, Oregon; the Wanderers Club in Wellington, Florida; and Sand Hill Farm Golf Club in Waller, Texas.

In 2009, when the bottom fell out of the course design and development business, Johnson helped to build Sand Hill Farm. When it opened, he formed a management company dedicated to its maintenance, operation, master planning and eventual expansion. This fall, the private 9-hole club will grow to 12 holes, a design project led by Johnson and Rex VanHoose, a former colleague at Jacobsen Hardy.

“Sand Hill Farm has been an incredible experience for me, and my company will continue to head up the operation there,” said Johnson, who also serves as the facility’s GM, golf professional and Class A golf course superintendent. “There’s a special understanding that develops when a course architect is also the guy taking care of the finished product. Add another layer of learning and nuance when it comes to working that maintenance bottom line into an overall facility-operations budget.

“It’s been a full-spectrum learning experience at Sand Hill Farm — a sort of big-picture perspective that, going forward, Silva & Johnson will be able to share with all our design clients. … Everything else I learned from Brian Silva.”

The senior stateman at Silva & Johnson, Ltd., Silva, now 72, remains one of golf’s foremost interpreters of course designs conceived between the two World Wars.

In 1983, Cornish brought on the young Silva — then a USGA agronomist — as a partner. The protégé’s first original 18-hole design, The Captains Golf Course in Brewster, Massachusetts, was selected by Golf Digest as the country’s Best New Public Course for 1985. His subsequent original work — at New England daily-fees Waverly Oaks and Red Tail; at private clubs like Black Rock Country Club in Hingham, Massachusetts and Black Creek Club in Chattanooga, Tennessee, host of the 2005 USGA Men’s Mid-Amateur Championship — has been similarly feted.

Since the Great Recession, some 1,500 U.S. golf courses have closed or been radically repurposed. In that grim business environment, renovation acumen has dominated the course-development market — and Silva’s golden age credentials have shined even more brightly, as he carefully restored and re-imagined the vintage elements of Ross (at Seminole, Biltmore Forest, Maketewah in Cincinnati), Ross and Tom Bendelow (at Brookside Golf & Country Club in Columbus, Ohio), C.B. Macdonald and Raynor (at Fox Chapel, Everglades Club, Metairie Country Club just west of New Orleans) and Tillinghast (at Baltimore Five Farms and again at San Antonio Country Club).

“I’ve gotta be honest: Brian Johnson’s skills made many of these projects what they came to be — in a back-office respect, but also strategically,” Silva said. “Back when The Renaissance Club was being planned, I shared my routing and hole strategies with my colleagues at CSM, partners and associates. That’s just something we did, always good to get another set of eyes. … Well, that was 20 years ago. Brian was just a kid, but he got back to me with some stuff that knocked my socks off. Superb. A half-dozen of those holes are his work.

“He’s far more resourceful and experienced today, naturally. He’s more than ready, and I’ve got a few good years left in me. We can’t wait to get started.”