The Los Angeles Country Club: North Course

For nearly a century, LACC's North Course was American golf's greatest mystery — a George C. Thomas Jr. masterpiece hidden behind Beverly Hills hedgerows, famous for declining every invitation to host. Gil Hanse and Geoff Shackelford's 2010 restoration stripped away decades of overgrowth to reveal Thomas's strategic genius, and Wyndham Clark's 2023 U.S. Open victory finally showed the world what members had always known.

The history of the Los Angeles Country Club begins in the fall of 1897, when a group of Los Angeles residents organized the Los Angeles Golf Club and leased a sixteen-acre lot at the corner of Pico and Alvarado Streets. They built a nine-hole course and fashioned a makeshift clubhouse from the bottom of an abandoned windmill, giving the layout its first name: "The Windmill Links." The club's early years were defined by restless relocation. By the middle of 1898, the course had become too crowded, and the club moved to Pico Heights at Hobart and 16th Streets, a site near Rosedale Cemetery known as "The Convent Links" for its position behind a convent. Further moves followed as the growing city encroached on each successive location. It was not until 1911 that the club found its permanent home, purchasing a 320-acre site on Wilshire Boulevard on the western edge of Beverly Hills. The club reopened on May 30, 1911, with 36 holes of golf and tennis courts, establishing the footprint it occupies to this day at the intersection of Beverly Hills and Century City. The early courses on the Wilshire Boulevard property were serviceable but unremarkable. In 1921, the club engaged W. Herbert Fowler, the distinguished English architect known for his work at Walton Heath, to redesign the North Course. George C. Thomas Jr., who had recently relocated to Southern California, assisted Fowler in the project. Thomas came from a prominent Philadelphia family -- his father was a partner at the investment bank Drexel & Company -- and had attended the Episcopal Academy before graduating from the University of Pennsylvania in 1894. Before turning to golf architecture, Thomas had established himself as a nationally recognized rose breeder, cultivating some 1,200 varieties on his Bloomfield Farm and publishing several authoritative books on the subject.

He was also a member of the so-called "Philadelphia School" of golf architecture alongside A.W. Tillinghast, William Flynn, Hugh Wilson, George Crump, and William Fownes, a group that collectively designed over 300 courses. After working with Fowler on the initial redesign, Thomas returned to the North Course in 1927-28 for a complete reworking of the layout, this time in collaboration with construction superintendent William P. Bell. Thomas's redesign was a masterwork of strategic architecture. The defining natural feature of the property is a broad, dry barranca -- a ravine carved by seasonal water flow -- that winds through the heart of the course. Thomas incorporated this barranca into the design with extraordinary imagination, routing holes two through eight over and along it. On five of those holes, the barranca directly intercepts or threatens shots, fronting some greens, running parallel to certain fairways, and demanding diagonal carries on others. The result is a course that rewards bold, precise shotmaking while offering multiple strategic options on nearly every hole. Thomas published his design philosophy in his 1927 book "Golf Architecture in America: Its Strategy and Construction," and the North Course at LACC stands as perhaps its finest physical expression. The course features several remarkable individual holes. The eleventh is a sweeping par five that bends through the property's natural contours. The par-three fifteenth demands a precise tee shot to a well-defended green.

Thomas's greens throughout the North Course are varied in shape and subtle in their internal contours, reflecting his belief that the green complex is the most important element of any hole. The terrain itself contributes to the course's character: gentle ridges and swales create natural movement across the fairways, and the property's elevation changes, while not dramatic, provide enough variety to make each hole visually and strategically distinct. For decades, the Los Angeles Country Club maintained a pronounced reluctance to host major championships or invite public attention of any kind. The club turned away multiple opportunities to stage professional tournaments, and the North Course remained largely unseen by the golfing public. This changed gradually in the twenty-first century. In February 2010, the club engaged Gil Hanse and Geoff Shackelford -- Thomas's biographer and a leading authority on his work -- to undertake an extensive restoration of the North Course. The goal was to return the course to Thomas's original design intent, which had been obscured by decades of incremental changes. The restoration proceeded in two phases: fairway bunkers were addressed in 2010, followed by greens and greenside bunkers in 2011. The second and eighth greens were returned to their original locations. The sixth green was lowered further. Original fairway widths and green dimensions were recaptured throughout. The result was a faithful reproduction of what Thomas had designed, with the barranca features once again playing their intended strategic roles. The restoration set the stage for the most significant event in the club's history.

On June 15-18, 2023, the Los Angeles Country Club hosted the 123rd U.S. Open -- the first major championship ever held at the venue and the first U.S. Open played in Los Angeles in seventy-five years (the previous one having been held at Riviera in 1948). Wyndham Clark, a twenty-nine-year-old American, produced a composed and brilliant performance to win by one stroke over Rory McIlroy. Clark's victory was his first major championship, and it was earned on a course that tested every dimension of the players' games. The barranca punished wayward approaches, the restored green complexes demanded precise distance control, and Thomas's strategic corridors rewarded players who chose their lines carefully off the tee. The championship was a critical and popular success, and it validated both the Hanse-Shackelford restoration and the club's decision to finally open its gates to the game's biggest stage. The North Course stretches to approximately 7,400 yards for championship play, routed across terrain that belies its location in the heart of one of the world's great cities. Bordered by Beverly Hills mansions and Century City towers, the property feels remarkably insular, its mature trees and rolling topography creating a sense of seclusion that few urban courses can match. George Thomas's design, now restored to its original vision, continues to challenge and inspire. The Los Angeles Country Club waited more than a century to share its North Course with the world, and the 2023 U.S. Open demonstrated that the wait was worthwhile. Thomas's architecture proved timeless -- as relevant and demanding in the modern era as it was when he first routed holes across the barranca nearly a hundred years ago.