WHAT A LONG STRANGE TRIP IT'S BEEN

Their partnership is somewhat unexpected. Gil Hanse is a fairway-smooth-talking design polymath and Grateful Dead nomad from rural New York. Jim Wagner is a Philly-tough shouter and former course superintendent who likes to keep his boots on the ground. But their jam—the stunning courses they make together—just keeps rocking the Top 100.

- By Josh Sens Photographs by Jason Tanaka Blaney

To say that Golden Gate Park in San Francisco, epicenter of the Summer of Love, has looser codes of conduct than those enforced at the city's private golf clubs is an understatement on the scale of calling Tiger Woods a stick. The worlds are as different as tweed and tie-dye. But on a recent Northern California swing, Gil Hanse moved easily between them. The acclaimed architect had winged west for a weekend that blended business with patchouli-scented pleasure. High on his agenda was a celebration of the 60th anniversary of his favorite band, the Grateful Dead, whose offshoot, Dead & Company, were performing in the park. Hanse had tickets to all three shows.

His schedule, though, was jam-packed in more ways than one. When he wasn't grooving to the strains of “Cassidy” and “Scarlet Begonias,” Hanse made the rounds at a handful of recent and pending commissions.

He checked in at the Olympic Club, which he and his longtime design partner, Jim Wagner, had updated in 2023, dropped by Lake Merced, where they had revived an Alister MacKenzie layout, and met with San Francisco Golf Club, one of the country's most exclusive enclaves, to start hashing out a new master plan.

All of those commitments were clustered within a few miles of the park, letting Hanse hopscotch from the concert venue to the clubs and back. A longer drive awaited. Before his trip was over, Hanse would motor two hours south to Monterey for conversations around Spanish Bay, the Pebble Beach Resort course that will go under his knife next year.

His counterpart, meanwhile, had a full slate of his own. On the far side of the country, Wagner was knee-deep in the finer points of High Grove, a private club in a Florida orange grove that will have its ribbon cutting in January, about a month after member play commences at Childress Hall, a Hanse/Wagner original in Eastern Texas.