Golf Community:

Madison Club

A day at the Madison Club is an experience to be savored with all the senses

By Jonathan Abrahams

Give a golf course architect a blank slate and a limitless
budget, and there’s a real danger of ending up with the golf course equivalent of a blinged-out Cadillac Escalade: a towering waterfall here, the longest par 5 in the state there, a mini-volcano, etc. Which is why Tom Fazio deserves some credit for his restraint at the Madison Club in La Quinta, California.

He created a stern but ultimately fair test that feels more like a monument to its members than its developer. And why not: The 225 folks lucky enough to join are required to shell out up to $5 million for homesites—on top of hefty initiation fees and dues.

Not that the course lacks flashes of extravagance. Madison has massive refrigeration systems buried under each green to cool the heat-hating bentgrass on the putting surfaces that Stimp at 12.

But on the whole, the course is more substance than flash. “We wanted to create something with an old-school feel in the mold of Bel-Air or Riviera,” says Michael Meldman, CEO of Discovery Land Company, which developed the 500-acre Madison for a cost of about $200 million. “If you look at those clubs, the houses are high above the golf course, so not only are the views beautiful, but there’s a sense of privacy for residents and golfers.”

Those L.A. clubs lack desert surroundings—as does Madison, in defiance of its location. Fazio moved more than 5 million cubic yards of dirt and imported 3,500 mature deciduous trees to create a lush, rolling sanctuary. Consider the par-5 18th hole: A creek tumbles down the right side into a tranquil pond. A 50-foot elm guards the narrow, undulating green. Golfers play their approach shots against a backdrop of the snow-capped Santa Rosa mountains and a vintage railroad-style bridge that leads to the classically styled clubhouse, which, when completed, will sit high on a hill. “The idea from the beginning was to make people forget they’re playing in the desert,” says Meldman.

Fazio received a similar directive when he manifested Shadow Creek Golf Club out of another desert landscape outside Las Vegas in 1989. And yet, because of the residential element of Madison, it was a completely different process. “There will be lots of talk about all the dirt we moved to make this course,” says Fazio. “But we began by trying to figure out how much dirt we had to move in order to create 225 outstanding lots.”

To do so, Fazio carved a series of huge channels in the desert. The homes are sited between the channels and look over the course, laid out in the shallow canyons below. “It’s nice when the native land gives you some hints on what to do, but that also comes with some complicated realities,” says Fazio. “You see a lake that you’d like to build a dogleg around, but environmental laws tell you not to do anything within 70 yards of it. So you’re making compromises. At Madison, there were no compromises. We just built the lakes ourselves.”

At more than 7,400 yards, Madison challenges every club in the bag without being ridiculously punitive. Fazio’s trademark mounding gives the course some receptiveness off the tee, while the undulating, well-bunkered fairways and greens provide obstacles from the approach shot in. Dipping in and around the hillocks and ponds here is a bit like listening to a symphony; there are plenty of beautiful elements, but the combination is what’s most memorable. And one tends to forget that it’s all man-made.