Forget the National Golf Links of America and Shinnecock and Maidstone. Forget Garden City and Piping Rock and The Creek Club. And please spare yourself the seasickness on your ferry to Fishers Island.
It turns out you don’t have to be a blueblood to be Long Island’s most exclusive tee time. As long as you’re playing in someone’s front yard.
Three Ponds Farm isn’t just someone’s front yard, that’s what it is by Ivan Kaufman front yard. Today, after a $35 million purchase in 2019, the Long Island real estate scion is the owner and primary beneficiary of “The K-Club at Three Ponds Farm” in Bridgehampton, NY – a 58-acre tract of rolling farmland that has been transformed into one of the wildest 18-hole golf courses in the world.
Fifty-eight acres isn’t a lot to build a golf course on, especially when several of those acres are already dedicated to the living space, sunroom, graceful driveway, pool, guest house, and a few museum-quality gardens. As such, the golf at Three Ponds Farm is as space efficient as a studio apartment in the West Village. Not an inch of the site is wasted, with bunkers shaped from every angle for framing and huge putting greens lined with Swiss cheese through slopes and planks for maximum variety.
The origin story of Three Ponds Farm is not unlike many other great golf courses. A sandy piece of farmland in a beautiful corner of the world. An interested investor (Edward Gordon) who makes a bargain purchase (original sales price: less than $1 million!). A bold idea – to build a world-class golf course – and a course designer (Rees Jones) with a touch of creative genius and an aversion to waste.
Eventually, a golf course was built and Ryan Loudenslager, the caretaker of another Jones golf course, Bethpage Black, was hired as a full-time super. Over time ownership changed, nine holes became 18 and Three Ponds Farm became ‘The K-Club’.
“It’s quite charming, isn’t it?” says Jones with a grin. “And not small either.”
Today, the K-Club at Three Ponds Farm is indeed much larger than life. Some golf experiences are memorable, but how many are? memorably quiet? On a busy day, Three Ponds Farm might have 15 players. On a quiet day, like a Tuesday in September after the high season? Well, you might be the only golfer of any kind. (And to answer the ongoing follow-up: Yes, It is still common to fill in divots and repair ball marks, even on a course with no other players.)
The course is played at the request of the owner, but luckily he is a real golf enthusiast. At Kaufman’s insistence, the scale of Three Ponds Farm has been doubled, from a nine-hole loop best played twice, to an 18-hole story with several individual acts. Loudenslager, who went from 35,000 rounds a year at Bethpage to “about 500” at K-Club, keeps the grounds lush, bouncy and fast. But he and Kaufman aren’t done there yet: Every spring, new tee boxes appear around the property, introducing new hole options and routing selections.
The result is five greens with multiple flags and a dozen fairways that golfers traverse in all directions, making the holes feel exotic and familiar at the same time. A major reason for the effect is the route, which is less chronological than orbital, circulating like well-manicured planets around an elegant sun through the grounds surrounding Kaufman’s mission revival-style mansion.
On several holes, the preferred line and landing area is “the barn” – technically the property’s “guest house” – which once served as a storage facility for the dairy farm that stood on the property in front of the golf course. The barn is nestled in a valley between two greens, in the middle of a green carpet of fairway that stretches more than 100 yards wide. It’s the kind of ‘use what you get’ quirk you’d expect in golf’s ancestral homeland of Scotland, and its role in golf is responsible for three of the best holes on the property.
Overall, the experience is proudly one of one – and not just for Fijian waters and fast golf carts. It’s not hard to daydream on an afternoon at Three Ponds. How many holes could you play in a day? How fast could you play them? Is the best way to play a solo 36? Or is it a four-ball match, or a six-ball match… or a ten-ball match?
The answer to these and all other questions is: Yes. That’s the beauty of golf at The K-Club: the scope of your stimulation is equal to the scope of your imagination.
“This place is like the Disneyland of golf,” says Loudenslager, and of course he’s right. But he is also wrong.
At Disneyland, wonder is a thing. Here’s the passion project – and passion is in No shortage.
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