Jacksonville, Fla. - Brian Silva’s restoration work at Florida golf clubs such as Seminole in North Palm Beach, Mountain Lake Club in Lake Wales and The Everglades Club in Palm Beach peg him as an interpreter of classic course design. But the refurbishment at Deerwood Country Club, which reopens for member play Sept. 3, was more sweeping than interpretive.
“At Deerwood, we renovated with a capital ‘R,’ essentially creating a new golf course within the previous corridors of play,” said Silva, a partner with Uxbridge, Mass.-based Cornish, Silva & Mungeam. “The club felt quite strongly that a ‘new’ course – one that takes optimum advantage of what remains an excellent piece of North Florida terrain – would position the club best in a highly competitive market.”
Deerwood typifies an emerging trend in the Southeast, one in which established facilities, most of them private, tear down completely and start from scratch, creating a new golf course (via a new designer) and thus a newly branded product. At Deerwood, not one blade of grass survived Silva’s complete makeover of a 1961 George Cobb layout. The project was akin to Silva’s work at the Card Sound Golf Club in Key Largo, where the architect completely reimagined and pumped healthy doses of vintage design into a 1960s-era golf course.
Working closely with longtime Deerwood superintendent Dave Amirault, Stuart, Fla.-based TDI International broke ground on Jan. 5, 2004. The grand reopening festivities will take place on schedule over Labor Day weekend.
“This was the first gated community in Florida, and in terms of the housing components, it’s one of the most comfortable, spacious real-estate master plans I’ve seen,” Silva said. “However, the original course was built on a limited budget. There are tremendous water features here: The lake on the 10th, for example, stretches the entire length of the golf hole, but the old green was 50 yards from the hazard. Here and elsewhere, far better strategic and aesthetic use could be made of this unique piece of property and its water features. The resulting strategies brought on by newly created greens and bunkers make Deerwood look and play like it was built 80 years ago, but with the best available grasses, construction techniques, drainage and irrigation systems.”
Though it’s a renovation, the Deerwood project is tantamount to original design.
“We started over,” Silva said. “This is a new golf course from the first tee to the 18th green, and everything in between. New drainage scheme underlying the entire course. New irrigation system. The works. When it reopened, folks familiar with the old design wouldn’t recognize the place, which, from the club’s perspective, was the whole point.”
“Brian came to us very highly recommended,” said Deerwood general manager Rocky Staples, who said the $5-million course renovation is part of a $9.5-million capital expenditure that also includes a complete clubhouse makeover. “The members bought this club four years ago; they knew then that this work had to be done.”