Atlantic Golf Club

Wind dictates everything at Atlantic. Rees Jones shaped wide fairways framed by native fescues on a windswept Bridgehampton property, and the ocean breezes that rip across the Hamptons turn this links-inspired layout into a different examination every day — firm, fast, and demanding a ground game most American courses never ask for.

Atlantic Golf Club came to life through the vision of developer Lowell Schulman, a member of the USGA's Museum Committee whose passion for golf's history gave him specific ideas about what a serious private club should look like. In 1988, Schulman spent a weekend in the Hamptons and began seriously evaluating sites for a new club, examining four candidate properties before settling on a 204-acre parcel in Bridgehampton known as Equinex Farm, owned by Francesco Calesi. The topography distinguished this site from the others immediately: swales, ridges, and natural ponds distributed across open farmland in a pattern that suggested a links-style course without requiring the extensive artificial shaping that most inland American sites demand. Rees Jones was hired to translate that potential into golf. Jones routed the course to make maximum use of the natural contours Schulman had identified, framing holes with knobs, mounds, and moguls that evoke the appearance of a course shaped over centuries by coastal weather.

The links-like character is reinforced by firm, sandy-based turf typical of the South Fork's maritime climate -- the same glacial outwash deposits that give Shinnecock Hills its character are present here, creating naturally fast-draining ground that produces playing conditions closer to British links than to the lush, soft American parkland courses of the northeast interior. The strong winds that sweep the Bridgehampton site from multiple directions add a strategic dimension that changes the effective challenge of every hole depending on the day's conditions. The course opened for play in 1991, with Golf Digest naming it the best new private course of 1992. Atlantic's competitive debut came with the 1995 Met Open, won by Darrell Kestner. The course made its first appearance in Golf Digest's America's 100 Greatest ranking in 1997 at number 65 -- a debut ranking that confirmed the architectural community's assessment of Jones's work at Bridgehampton as among his finest and placed Atlantic in the company of courses with far longer historical pedigrees.

The ranking has been maintained through subsequent years, and the course has hosted numerous major regional amateur and professional events, including multiple USGA qualifying rounds and Met Area championships. The course measures approximately 6,900 yards from the back tees and plays to a par of 72. The routing is fundamentally a links design in spirit: wide fairways that reward ground game strategy, firm putting surfaces that roll true and fast, and green complexes positioned to make wind direction a primary factor in club selection. Jones incorporated deep grass hollows and collection areas around several greens that penalize approaches that miss short or left, a feature that becomes more punishing as the wind shifts. The 7th hole, a par-3 playing over a pond to a narrow green defended by steep falloffs on both sides, is frequently cited by members and visiting players as a standout hole on the East End. Atlantic was the first private course on Long Island's South Fork to achieve Top 100 status since Shinnecock Hills, and its ranking confirmed that serious championship golf was not limited to the historic clubs of the area. The club's membership is deliberately limited, maintaining the single-purpose private golf club ethos that Schulman envisioned from the beginning. No residential component, no hotel, no public events -- Atlantic exists purely to provide golf on a course designed to challenge and reward its members at every level of ability. Jones's design succeeds because it treats the natural landscape as the primary design element, using existing topography to frame holes and relying on the maritime climate to provide the strategic complexity that artificial features elsewhere must supply.