Aldarra Golf Club

Carved through corridors of Douglas fir and western red cedar, Aldarra plays along ridges and across ravines with the Cascade Range as a constant backdrop. Fazio found a property east of Seattle that feels a world removed from it — lush, vertical, and unmistakably Pacific Northwest.

Aldarra Golf Club in Sammamish, Washington, stands as the only golf course in Washington State designed by Tom Fazio — a private layout on 525 acres of the former Boeing family estate known as Aldarra Farms. The farm was a renowned mid-twentieth century livestock and cattle operation owned by the Boeing family, and the land retains the pastoral character of a great Northwest estate. When the property transitioned to golf development, club founders engaged Tom Fazio — whose design portfolio includes some of the most celebrated private courses in the country — to create a course worthy of the site. The result, which opened in 2001, was the first project Fazio's firm had undertaken in the Pacific Northwest.

Fazio described the assignment in terms that reflected its significance: "Aldarra was our first course in the Northwest, which makes it a very important golf course. If my design firm is going to 'fly our flag' in a particular area, the golf can't be just good — it has to be 'as good as it gets.'" The Aldarra Farms property gave Fazio a canvas of extraordinary natural beauty to work with: forested ridges, natural meadows, and the panoramic backdrop of the Cascade Mountains and Mount Si that make this among the most visually spectacular private courses in the American West. Fazio's 2001 design artfully integrates the natural landscape, routing the course through forested corridors and across open meadows with the Cascades and the distinctive profile of Mount Si as constant backdrops. The property's 525 acres allowed Fazio to route the 18 holes with generous separation between fairways, creating a sense of isolation and natural immersion rare even among the finest private courses in the region.

Each hole occupies its own natural corridor, with the forested terrain providing visual boundaries without imposing the claustrophobic feeling that can afflict heavily wooded courses in the Pacific Northwest. The course plays as a par-71 layout stretching to 6,885 yards from the championship tees. The routing runs through rolling terrain 20 miles east of downtown Seattle on the Sammamish Plateau, moving between the forested sections that recall the farm's pastoral history and the open ridgeline sections where the mountain views dominate. The combination of topographic variety and mountain panorama creates a playing experience that captures the essence of Pacific Northwest golf in a way that courses closer to the city cannot replicate.

The Washington Golf Association has used Aldarra as a venue for high-level amateur events, and the course has been recognized by Golf Digest and other major publications as one of the best private courses in Washington and the broader Pacific Northwest. Today Aldarra Golf Club remains among the most sought-after memberships in the Pacific Northwest, a Tom Fazio design that honors the natural beauty of the Sammamish Plateau and the legacy of the Aldarra Farms estate. The Boeing family's farm has become, in Fazio's hands, a golf course that the architect himself identified as a standard-bearer for everything his firm's work aspires to achieve.