Desmond Muirhead

Though not as well-known as golf history’s most flamboyant personalities – think Arnold Palmer, Lee Trevino, Seve Ballesteros – few more eccentric characters have left a significant impact on the game than golf course architect Desmond Muirhead.

Among casual golfers, Muirhead might be known as the architect from the latter decades of the 20^th century who built golf holes shaped like mermaids, fish and other symbolic shapes. And while he is responsible for some inventive and off-menu features, this work was something of a coda on a decades-long career. Not only did Muirhead practice golf course design, he helped change it during a period of unprecedented growth.

Like many golf course architects, Muirhead studied landscape architecture. After studying at Cambridge in his native England before a stint in the Royal Air Force and then the University of British Columbia, he became interested in landscape architecture at the University of Oregon, and would ultimately settle in Newport Beach, California.

But unlike practically every other architect, Muirhead approached golf from the outside, as a community planner. Though golf and real estate had been integrated for decades before Muirhead became active in it, from the 1960s on, he would be the leading figure in master-planning for both golf and housing.

Muirhead would integrate golf with housing in creative ways. At Desert Island Country Club in Rancho Mirage, California, he dealt with a large, square property by placing the real estate at its center, away from the busy perimeter roads, using a surrounding lake and the golf course as a buffer. The Coachella Valley is also home to arguably Muirhead’s most famous solo design, also harmoniously integrated with surrounding homes: The Dinah Shore Tournament Course at Mission Hills Country Club. From 1972 to 2022, it hosted the LPGA Tour major now known as the Chevron Championship. The risk-reward, island-green par-5 18^th hole flanked by Poppie’s Pond is one of Muirhead’s lasting contributions to championship golf.

The beauty and harmony of Muirfield Village Golf Club, which is known as Jack Nicklaus’ domain and the host venue of the Golden Bear’s annual Memorial Tournament on the PGA Tour, is also greatly attributable to Muirhead, who designed the community in which the course resides while also being involved with the course itself, although with each passing year it becomes more and more Nicklaus’ creation.

Muirhead and Nicklaus had a falling-out during their collaboration at Muirfield Village, and it caused the former to put golf aside for several years. But he returned to the game after a chance meeting with several Japanese businessmen who were fans of his work. He would design several courses in Japan, as well as other countries in Asia. He also dipped his toe back into golf design in the United States.


This is the era of his career when his most radical ideas would emerge. At Stone Harbor Golf Club in coastal New Jersey, Muirhead unveiled several wild concepts, but none more controversial than “Clashing Rocks,” a par 3 with a green surrounded by water, flanked by two zigzag-edged bunkers that were, themselves, islands. It proved too strange to last more than a handful of years before being softened.

While some other of Muirhead’s symbolic golf holes and features – including an entire hole that looked like a mermaid from overhead at Aberdeen Country Club near West Palm Beach, Fla. – have also fallen by the wayside, several of his eccentric concepts have endured, especially at his overseas courses. Segovia Golf Club Chiyoda in Japan has a par 3 with a half-donut-shaped green, while another par 3 has an island green fronted by a near-island bunker. Jagged-edged bunkers like those from Clashing Rocks still exist – on consecutive holes, no less – at Shibayama Golf Club east of Tokyo.

In these unusual features and holes, Muirhead showcased an open-mindedness and willingness to push boundaries that few other architects have exhibited. Although stylistically different, one can’t help but find a bit of Muirhead’s cheekiness in the more radical golf-flavored earthworks of Mike Strantz or Rob Collins and Tad King.

Although some of his more adventurous and bizarre concepts have prompted some golfers to dismiss him as kooky, Desmond Muirhead was a serious contributor to the arc of golf design in the latter half of the 20^th century. By the time he passed away in 2002, he had not only debuted novel one-off concepts, he had established a new way for land planners to think about the integration of golf holes and homes. It is not a stretch to say that the more thoughtfully laid out latter-day golf communities have Muirhead to thank for inspiration.


"Desmond was a outsized presence, with his princely beard and his booming laugh. He was a kind and generous man, a bon vivant and raconteur. Desmond was a non-conformist, too, a self-styled provocateur who enjoyed tweaking the golf establishment." - Architect and writer John Strawn, in an essay

"His return to golf came with a simple edict: Moving forward he would draw from legend, lore, symbolism and fantasy — all part of the human experience, and to him, an interesting and missing element in his earlier work. Not to mention the work of nearly every golf course architect who ever practiced before this time." Architect and long-time friend Forrest Richardson, in an essay