Stonehouse

Stonehouse opened in 1996 and the honors landed immediately—Golf Digest named it the best new upscale public course in the country, and Golf Magazine put it in the top ten new courses you could play. Mike Strantz, the Fazio protégé who built Royal New Kent just down the road the same year, said he wanted a mountain-style course that disturbed the land as little as possible; what the land offered was bold, abrupt contours, steep ravines and enormous greens set on the edges of natural bluffs in the York River tidewater.

Then the 2008 crash bled it dry. By 2017 the greens were gone, the tee boxes bare, the fairways overgrown—and that November the gates closed. New owners bought the property in December 2018, rebuilt every playing surface, and reopened it on July 4th, 2019; by 2022 the golf press was calling it one of the most improved courses in America. The wild turkeys never left the hardwoods, and neither did the drama.

Greens on the bluff edge

Strantz-scale putting surfaces, perched on the ravines

The signature at Stonehouse isn't one hole—it's what happens at nearly every green. Strantz built them enormous and hung them on the lips of ravines and natural drainage cuts, so the approach carries real consequence: short can mean a lost ball, and the long putts break with the landform, not against it. He was always proudest, he said, of the dirt he didn't move here.