O ur semi-desert Karoo regions of South Africa are defined by their low rainfall, cloudless skies, and extremes of heat and cold. It’s a stark, hostile, yet beautiful environment. Now a newly opened golf resort in Florida, United States, has appropriated the Karoo name for their centrepiece course attraction. As you can see from the image, this is a most unusual course, covered in so much sand – like the Karoo itself – that it’s hard to make sense of individual holes in an alien- looking and fragmented landscape. What’s even more shocking to learn is that Karoo was built on top of another course once ranked in America’s Top 100. At first impression, the new Karoo Course at Cabot Citrus Farms an hour north of Tampa strikes chords of both familiarity and otherness. With its washes of sand, nibbled- on bunker edges and burbling swaths of turf, it is of the moment in golf architecture. The phantasmic Karoo landscape comes from the imagination of architect Kyle Franz, who cut his teeth working for Tom Doak and Gil Hanse. He designed it over the top of the Pine Barrens course at the former World Woods Golf Club. The Cabot Collection, the Canada-based luxury resort development company behind Cabot Cape Breton, Cabot Saint Lucia and other international golf des- tinations, acquired the struggling facility in 2022 and rebranded it Cabot Citrus Farms. A second course will open later this year, along with a 9-holer and an 11-hole short course. When Pine Barrens, a Tom Fazio design situated on a broad dune ridge, opened in 1994, it was hailed as an every-person’s Pine Valley, open to the public with fairways out- lined by deep sandy pockets and rugged waste bunkers, each hole a unique entity ensconced in pines. Pine Barrens was among Fazio’s greatest efforts and rose to No 75 on America’s 100 Greatest Courses. Franz firstly removed a majority of trees from the Karoo site, a decision that might enhance the health of the turf but erases the natural sensuousness that made journeys through Pine Barrens feel exotic. Karoo’s de- parture is stark, the naked landscape awash in waves of riptide ground movements and exposed sand bobbing in all directions. The holes occupy the same corridors with the same green sites, though everything is expanded and redesigned bigger and more obviously sculpted. Six of the greens are the size of those on the Old Course at St Andrews. The green fee varies between $395 and $430 (about R7 500) in high season, reduced to $220 in summer.
UNIQUE FEEL With exposed sand and towering trees, Kyle Franz’s design of the Karoo Course feels like it was transplanted from Pinehurst.
GOLF DIGEST SOUTH AFRICA 107
MARCH/APRIL 2025
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