Forget the National Golf Links of America and Shinnecock and Maidstone. Forget Garden City and Piping Rock and The Creek Club. And please, save yourself the seasickness on your ferry over to Fishers Island.
As it turns out, you don’t have to be a blue blood to be Long Island’s most exclusive tee time. So long as you’re alright playing on somebody’s front lawn.
Three Ponds Farm is not just somebody’s front lawn, it’s Ivan Kaufman’s front lawn. 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, N.Y. – a 58-acre plot of rolling farmland that has been transformed into one of the wildest 18-hole golf courses anywhere in the world.
Fifty-eight acres is not much to build a golf course upon, particularly when some of those acres have already been dedicated to the property’s living quarters, sun room, ornate driveway, swimming pool, guest cottage and pair of museum-quality gardens. As such, the golf at Three Ponds Farm is as space-efficient as a studio apartment in the West Village. No inch of the property is wasted, with bunkers shaped to frame from every angle and enormous putting greens swiss-cheesed by slopes and shelves for maximum variety.
The origin story of Three Ponds Farm is not unlike that of many other great golf courses. A sandy plot of farmland in a gorgeous corner of the world. An interested investor (Edward Gordon) making a bargain purchase (original sale price: less than $1 million!). A bold idea – to build a world-class golf course – and a course designer (Rees Jones) with a flash of creative brilliance and a distaste for waste.
Eventually, a golf course was built, and Ryan Loudenslager, the caretaker at another one of Jones’s courses, Bethpage Black, was hired as the full-time super. Over time, ownership changed, nine holes became 18, and Three Ponds Farm became “The K-Club.”
“It’s pretty charming, right?” Jones says 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 quietly 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 just might be the only golfer of any kind. (And, to answer the lingering follow-up: Yes, is still common courtesy to fill divots and repair ball marks, even on a course with no other players.)
Play on the course occurs at the owner’s behest, but thankfully, he’s a bit of a golf nut. At Kaufman’s prompting, the scale of Three Ponds Farm has doubled, from a nine-hole loop best played twice into an 18-hole story with several distinct acts. Loudenslager, who went from 35,000 rounds per year at Bethpage to “about 500” at the K-Club, keeps the property lush, bouncy and fast. But he and Kaufman aren’t done there: New tee boxes pop up around the property every spring, introducing new hole options and routing selections.
The result is five multi-flag greens and a dozen fairways that golfers crisscross in every direction, making the holes feel at once exotic and familiar. A considerable reason for the affect is the routing, which is not chronological so much as it is orbital, circulating the property surrounding Kaufman’s mission revival-style mansion like well-manicured planets around an elegant sun.
On several holes, the preferred line and landing area is “the barn” – technically the property’s “guest cottage” – which once served as storage for the dairy farm that existed on property before the golf course. The barn sits nestled in a valley between two greens, plopped in the center of a green carpet of fairway that spreads more than 100 yards wide. It’s the kind of use-what-you’re-given quirk that one might expect to see in golf’s ancestral homeland of Scotland, and its role in the golf is responsible for three of the best holes on the property.
On the whole, the experience is proudly one of one – and not just for the Fiji waters and high-speed golf carts. On an afternoon at Three Ponds, it is not hard to find yourself daydreaming. How many holes could you play in a day? How quickly could you play them? Is the best manner of playing a solo 36? Or is it a four-ball match, or a six-ball … or a 10-ball?
The answer, to these and every other question, is yes. That’s the beauty of golf at The K-Club: The extent of your stimulation is equal to the extent of your imagination.
“This place is like the Disneyland of golf,” says Loudenslager, and of course he’s right. But he’s also wrong.
At Disneyland, wonder is a business. Here it is passion project – and passion is in no shortage.
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