A Quiet Masterpiece In The Heart Of The City
There are few places where golf and city life sit quite so improbably as they do at Los Angeles Country Club. Occupying a remarkable sweep of green between Beverly Hills and the wider metropolis, the club rests on some of the most valuable sporting land in the world. Beyond its boundaries, Los Angeles moves at its usual pace. Inside them, things feel completely different.
This is a landscape of hills, valleys, ridges and swales, mature trees and breathtaking views. And across it lies the North Course: a golf course entirely worthy of its extraordinary setting.
The story began in 1897 with the founding of the Los Angeles Golf Club. After three changes of address, the club finally arrived at its present Wilshire location in 1911.
Founders Joe Sartori and Ed Tufts, laid out the first course here. What followed was an evolution rather than a single act of creation.
Herbert Fowler refashioned the course in 1921, before George C. Thomas Jr. rerouted it in 1927. Their work gave the North much of the character for which it is now celebrated: golf that responds to the natural contours of the land rather than simply sitting upon them.
Decades later, Gil Hanse was entrusted with restoring the course, peeling it back and allowing the qualities of the earlier design to come forward again.
The result is a course that feels both grand and wonderfully natural.
A Landscape Made For Golf
Los Angeles Country Club has two 18-hole courses, the North and the South. If given enough time for only one round, the North is the one to play.
Its appeal is difficult to reduce to a collection of individual holes. Much of its pleasure comes instead from the way the course unfolds. Fairways rise and disappear over ridges. Greens occupy natural shelves. Valleys influence both sightlines and strategy. The ground itself is constantly involved.
It makes the North thrilling without being theatrical.
There is also an unusual sense of spaciousness. This is Los Angeles, yet for long stretches the city seems remarkably distant. Occasionally an imposing tower beyond the property line interrupts the illusion, but even these glimpses of urban life serve as reminders of just how unusual this place is: an expansive, almost pastoral landscape surrounded by one of the world's great cities.
The course asks serious questions, too. It is challenging and at times demanding, but rarely feels unreasonable. Good shots are rewarded. Poor decisions reveal themselves quickly. There is a clarity to the architecture that makes the difficulty compelling rather than oppressive.
The Short Holes, Played Long
If one family of holes defines the North, it’s the par threes.
They are formidable—often long, demanding and memorable. The 7th is perhaps the sternest of them, stretching to almost 240 yards. There is little ambiguity about the task. The green offers safety, but finding it requires a tee shot of considerable conviction.
The 9th provides a different kind of drama. With the clubhouse forming its backdrop, it is perhaps the course's most immediately recognisable hole, bringing together architecture, landscape and setting in a single composed view.
Yet ask those who know the course best and another hole enters the conversation.
The 11th is considered by many to be the star of the show. Here, downtown Los Angeles appears in the distance, the skyline framing a hole that seems to capture the strange beauty of golf in this particular corner of California. Manicured turf gives way visually to towers and cityscape—a juxtaposition that could belong nowhere else.
A Piece Of Los Angeles, Apart
The great quality of the North Course is not simply that it contains memorable holes. It’s that it sustains interest from beginning to end.
There are changes in scale and elevation, moments of intimacy followed by expansive views, and enough strategic uncertainty to keep the golfer engaged throughout the round. The architecture feels assured without needing to announce itself. The land does much of the talking.
As parkland golf goes, there is very little one could reasonably ask for beyond this.
Perhaps that is what makes Los Angeles Country Club so compelling. The value of the land might be measured in extraordinary sums, but its real luxury lies in what has not been built upon it. In a city associated with reinvention and constant movement, this landscape has been permitted to remain open.
A century of architectural thought has shaped it, from Fowler to Thomas to Hanse, yet the North still feels fundamentally connected to the ground beneath it.
Beautiful, demanding and quietly exhilarating, it is a course that rewards attention rather than spectacle.
A little piece of golfing heaven, hidden in plain sight.