Somerset Hills Country Club

One of A.W. Tillinghast's earliest and most celebrated eighteen-hole designs, Somerset Hills Country Club is a masterwork of strategic architecture set within the rolling hills of northern New Jersey. The course rewards thoughtful play and remains a top-tier private clubs in the state.

Somerset Hills Country Club was officially organized on June 21, 1899, at the Somerset Hills Inn on Mendham Road in New Jersey's Somerset Hills region. The official charter was adopted on August 1 and subsequently certified by the State of New Jersey on October 11 of that year. Charles Ledyard Blair, then in his thirties, served as the club's first president. The founding members were primarily New York City residents who maintained summer homes in the Somerset Hills — a landscape of wooded ridges, rolling meadows, and quiet streams in the northern reaches of the state. The use of "country" in the club's name reflected this dynamic: it was a retreat from the city, a place where the pleasures of rural life could be enjoyed in cultivated surroundings. Tennis, social gatherings, and outdoor recreation formed the initial focus, with golf arriving soon after as the game's popularity swept through the American Northeast. In its earliest years, the club operated a modest nine-hole course at a site along the Raritan River, partly in Bernards Township and partly in Bedminster. By 1902, membership stood at just sixty-five, and the facilities were far from grand. But the club's trajectory was about to change dramatically. In 1916, the decision was made to relocate to a new site in Bernardsville and to engage A.W. Tillinghast — then emerging as one of America's most brilliant and original golf course architects — to design a proper eighteen-hole course.

Work began on April 20, 1916, and the course opened two years later in 1918, establishing the layout that has defined Somerset Hills ever since. Tillinghast's design at Somerset Hills represents one of his most enduring and authentic works. Unlike many Golden Age courses that have been repeatedly remodeled over the past century, Somerset Hills has remained remarkably close to its original form, making it arguably the most faithful surviving expression of Tillinghast's design philosophy. The architect worked with a property that offered two distinct characters: the front nine occupies relatively flat terrain that includes the footprint of a former racetrack, while the back nine climbs into hillier, more wooded ground past rock outcroppings, around a lake, and through terrain that rises and falls with natural drama. Tillinghast designed the two nines in deliberately contrasting styles, using the flat openness of the front to test precision and the undulating hills of the back to demand creativity and course management. The greens at Somerset Hills are widely considered among Tillinghast's boldest and most varied set of putting surfaces. Tom Doak, himself among the most respected course architects of the modern era, has stated that "the greens at Somerset Hills are the most bold and varied set of putting surfaces Tillinghast ever built." Dolomite mounds edge one green while startling knobs punctuate another, and throughout the course, the putting surfaces demand careful reading and precise distance control. Tillinghast incorporated several template holes into his design, including a Redan, a Plateau, and a Westward Ho, each adapted to the specific terrain and conditions of the property rather than slavishly copied from their originals. The second hole has earned particular renown. A 205-yard par three, it is Tillinghast's interpretation of the Redan concept — a hole type that originated at North Berwick in Scotland and has been replicated by architects around the world. At Somerset Hills, the green complex moves from right to left, with a slope that makes the only acceptable landing area appear to be the right side of the putting surface.

The design challenges players to shape their tee shots against the natural inclination of the terrain, rewarding those who trust the architecture and penalizing those who play safe. Golf Digest panelists have ranked Somerset Hills' Redan higher than any of the many versions created by Charles Blair Macdonald or Seth Raynor — a remarkable distinction given the pedigree of those architects' work. The course stretches to 6,784 yards with a par of 71, modest figures by modern standards but ones that belie the difficulty of the layout. The challenge at Somerset Hills comes not from length but from the precision demanded by Tillinghast's angles, the complexity of his green contours, and the strategic options presented on every hole. The routing asks golfers to think carefully about position, trajectory, and ground game — skills that matter at Somerset Hills in ways that raw distance does not. For much of the twentieth century, the course evolved gradually as trees matured and grew inward, narrowing fairways and obscuring sight lines that Tillinghast had originally intended. Starting in the 1990s, the club began a careful process of clearing non-indigenous pine trees from the interior of the course. By the time the work was substantially complete, only two of those pines remained. Nature accelerated the process in 2012 when Hurricane Sandy toppled approximately two hundred trees, paradoxically restoring openness that had been lost over decades of growth. More deliberate restoration work began in 2009, when Tom Doak's Renaissance Golf Design — with associate Brian Slawnik and superintendent Ryan Tuxhorn running point — undertook a careful project to restore the original dimensions and textures of the course. Work continued in phases through 2010 and 2013.

The team removed additional trees, expanded fairways to provide more strategic options off the tee, restored natural areas and made them more playable, and expanded the greens to recapture hole locations that had been lost as the putting surfaces shrank over time. The goal was not to impose a new vision but to peel back the accumulated changes of ninety years and reveal Tillinghast's original design beneath. Somerset Hills has served as a valued competitive venue throughout its history. The club hosted the Curtis Cup in 1990, where the United States women's amateur team dominated Great Britain and Ireland in a commanding 14-4 victory. The second green figured prominently in the competition, with the U.S. team winning four matches on that hole, including the one that clinched the outcome. Somerset Hills has also hosted USGA Girls' Junior championships in 1973 and 1983, and has been a beloved venue for Metropolitan Golf Association events, including the Met Amateur in 1982 and 2003, and the Ike Championship. Tucked behind the bucolic town center of Bernardsville, Somerset Hills remains a quiet, understated treasure of American golf architecture. Its modest English-style clubhouse reflects the club's character: refined without ostentation, confident without pretension. The course's consistent placement among the top one hundred in America speaks to the timeless quality of Tillinghast's design, while the faithful restoration work ensures that golfers today experience something very close to what the architect intended more than a century ago. For students of golf course architecture, Somerset Hills is an essential pilgrimage — a place where Tillinghast's genius is preserved in its most complete and uncompromised form.