Some New Courses You May Have Missed

You heard that six golf courses opened at the Mission Hills resort on Hainan Island last year, right?

My guess is that you've also heard about Greg Norman's new course at DaNang Golf Club in Vietnam. And about Gary Player's course at the Costa Baja resort in Mexico, not to mention Nick Faldo's course at the Elea resort on Cyprus and Tom Fazio's course at Baker's Bay in the Bahamas.

That's because all those courses, and many others like them, were built by companies with enough money to hire press agents and publicity people. When you aim to sell high-priced real estate, you've got to spread the word.

But lots of other courses opened all over the world in 2010, most with less fanfare and much less-famous designers. Here are four of them:

Vietnam. In January 2010, an 18-hole course opened at what’s expected to become Vietnam's largest golf resort. The course -– it’s been described as a “championship signature course” –- is the centerpiece of Royal Golf Club in Tam Diep, a town about 70 miles south of Hanoi. The course was designed by Peter Rousseau of Hanoi-based P&Z Development Corporation and built by a government-run company, PV-Inconess Investment Corporation, to bring tourists and their money to Ninh Binh Province. PV-Inconess controls 1,675 acres where it’ll eventually have some villas, a hotel, a shopping area, a water park, restaurants, a sports complex, and two more 18-hole tracks.

Italy. The 18-hole Mountain course at Castelfalfi Golf & Country Club in Montaione, Italy opened last summer, and the club’s 18-hole Lake course is expected to open this year, perhaps as early as the spring. The golf complex will anchor Toscana Resort Castelfalfi, a 2,750-acre spread in the heart of Tuscany. The property constitutes all four square miles of what used to be a quaint but crumbling Italian village that included a failing golf course (Castelfalfi Golf & Country Club) designed by the late Pier Luigi Mancinelli. TUI Hotels & Resorts, a German tour operator and hotelier, junked the existing golf course and brought in Wilfried Moroder and Rainer Preissmann to design the new ones.

Ukraine. Last fall, Kiev Golf Club opened its “flagship” course, a championship-length track designed by Peter Chamberlain, a Swedish architect. The Chamberlain course, as it's called, has already been selected to host the Ukraine’s first professional golf tournament, in 2012. Kiev Golf Club is part of a 1,000-acre community that will eventually have houses, an equestrian center, polo fields, and a variety of sports-related attractions, including an outdoor pool and a golf academy. Its developers aim to attract what they call “a narrow category of status users,” including diplomats, government officials, and international businessmen. The club has two existing nine-hole courses, the 1,870-yard Park course (it opened in 2008) and the 3,143-yard Club course (2009).

Poland. Question: What do you call Poland’s first fly-in golf community? Answer: Sobienie Royal Golf & Country Club. No joke. The club is located in the village of Sobienie-Jeziory (it’s roughly 30 miles south of Warsaw), and it opened the first nine holes of its Jonathan Davison-designed golf course last fall. The second nine is scheduled to open in the fall of this year. Sobienie Royal is being developed by a Warsaw-based company, Wiodarzewska Development Group, which aims to build 80 single-family houses, 190 apartments, a hotel, a spa, and, yes, an air strip on adjacent property. Davison is an associate at Ford Golf Group, a firm based in Horam (East Sussex), England, with satellite offices in Austria and the Czech Republic. Jeremy Ford, the company’s namesake, co-designed Prague City Golf Club, the first 18-hole course in Prague, in the Czech Republic.