The Lido

The Lido is a meticulous, down-to-the-inch recreation of Charles Blair Macdonald's legendary course that stood on Long Island from 1917 until its demolition during World War II. Tom Doak rebuilt the course from a detailed computer simulation developed by architecture enthusiast Peter Flory, who painstakingly reconstructed Macdonald's contours from historic photographs, aerial imagery, and written accounts. The result brings back iconic template holes -- Alps, Cape, Redan, Plateau -- set amid the sandy Wisconsin terrain.

The Lido at Sand Valley is among the intellectually ambitious golf course projects of the modern era — a meticulous recreation of C.B. Macdonald's original Lido Golf Club, which stood on Long Island from 1917 to the early 1940s before being demolished when the federal government converted its land to a naval base, and which had long been considered among the greatest lost courses in American golf history. The original Lido Golf Club was designed by Charles Blair Macdonald and Seth Raynor beginning around 1914, with construction completed by 1917. Macdonald, the father of American golf course architecture and founder of the USGA, had financed a design competition in The Times of London to solicit the ideal golf hole design, then commissioned the winning entrant — a marine engineer named C.H. Alison — to help create what Macdonald described as the finest golf course in the world. The site required massive dredging to bring the land up from a tidal flat, and the resulting course played across flat, links-like terrain on the south shore of Long Island. The Lido became famous for its enormous scale, its brilliant template holes, and the boldness of Macdonald and Raynor's design language. It was destroyed in the early 1940s and existed thereafter only in photographs, surveys, and the memories of those who had played it.

The recreation project became possible through the work of Peter Flory, a financial consultant and golf architecture enthusiast who spent years reconstructing the Lido's design from archival photographs, survey maps, and historical descriptions. Flory built a detailed computer simulation of the course, rendering each hole's contours in three-dimensional digital form. Sand Valley Resort proprietors Michael and Chris Keiser — who had already built Mammoth Dunes and Sand Valley's original 18-hole course on the Wisconsin property — discovered Flory's simulation and recognized that the 225-acre sand dune terrain to the north of their resort complex provided an almost uniquely appropriate site for a physical recreation of the lost course. They engaged Tom Doak to translate Flory's digital reconstruction into a buildable plan. Doak and his team worked from Flory's GPS topographical blueprint, reconstructing the famous template holes — the Plateau, Alps, Cape, and Long — with fidelity to the original contours while making minor adjustments for drainage and adding longer tee boxes to accommodate modern equipment distances. The Biarritz, Eden, Redan, and Road holes — the core of Macdonald and Raynor's template repertoire — all appear in configurations derived from historical evidence rather than architectural interpretation. The fifth hole features the enormous double green that Macdonald originally built to serve both the fifth and tenth holes, among the distinctive putting surfaces in American golf. The project required years of planning and construction before the course opened in May 2023.

The Lido opened to extraordinary acclaim from the golf architecture community. Reviewers consistently praised the course's scale — its greens are massive by any contemporary standard, and its bunkers are vast — and the authenticity of its recreation. Golf Digest named it the Best New Public Course of 2023, placing it immediately among the top-ranked public courses in the United States. The recreation raised philosophical questions about authenticity in architecture — whether a faithful physical reconstruction of a lost design constitutes a new work or a resurrection of the original — that generated considerable discussion in golf architecture circles. The Lido sits within the Sand Valley Resort complex and is accessible to the public alongside the original Sand Valley course and Mammoth Dunes. The three courses together make the Wisconsin property among the architecturally significant public golf destinations in the United States — and The Lido, as both architectural homage and original construction, occupies a singular position in the modern game's landscape. The Lido opened in May 2023 to extraordinary acclaim from the golf architecture community. Reviewers consistently praised the course's scale — its greens are massive by any contemporary standard, and its bunkers are vast — and the authenticity of its recreation.

Golf Digest named it the Best New Public Course of 2023, placing it immediately among the top-ranked public courses in the United States. The recreation raised philosophical questions about authenticity in architecture — whether a faithful physical reconstruction of a lost design constitutes a new work or a resurrection of the original — that generated considerable discussion in golf architecture circles. Tom Doak has described the project as the most intellectually demanding of his career: working from Flory's GPS topographical blueprint rather than from the landscape itself required a fundamentally different creative approach from his usual method of discovering a routing by walking the land. The Lido sits within the Sand Valley Resort complex and is accessible to the public alongside the original Sand Valley course and Mammoth Dunes. The three courses together make the Wisconsin property among the architecturally significant public golf destinations in the United States — and The Lido, as both architectural homage and original construction, occupies a singular position in the modern game's landscape.