Northwood Golf Club exists because Jack Neville, co-designer of Pebble Beach and a multiple-time California Amateur champion, looked at seventy wooded acres along the Russian River in 1925 and saw a golf course. He pitched landowner Claude Milleresch, and in 1928 Alister MacKenzie, working with partner Robert Hunter, designed the nine holes, the same year MacKenzie completed Cypress Point, so members of the Bohemian Club, whose famous Grove sits directly across the river, would have somewhere to play during their summer encampment. It remains MacKenzie's only nine-hole design in America.

On the course

The course plays 2,893 yards at par 36, and the redwoods are the architecture. Fairways run through corridors of old-growth trees that serve as the primary hazard, tight enough that guests joke the redwoods work as bumpers for kicking a ball back into the fairway. The greens are naturally contoured and carry the undulation MacKenzie is famous for, and the card mixes par 5s with short par 4s and one-shot holes, so nearly every club gets used despite the modest length. The ninth is the acknowledged signature hole.

Who it suits

Like many golden-age courses, Northwood barely survived its middle decades. A succession of owners ended in foreclosure, and in 1970 a group of local property owners incorporated as Northwood Recreation, Inc. under Dr. Charles Schaap and restored a run-down course blanketed in gopher mounds and daisies. Today it is public, inexpensive, and open year-round, and Golf.com has ranked it among the best nine-hole courses in the world; reviewers describe it as intimate and welcoming rather than precious about its pedigree.

Amenities stay simple by design: a clubhouse bar and restaurant for the post-round beer, solar-powered carts, membership options, and Youth on Course participation for juniors, with outings and events handled on site. Northwood is the pick for architecture pilgrims who want to walk a MacKenzie original at daily-fee prices, and for anyone pairing nine holes with a Russian River or Sonoma wine country weekend.

Architect: Alister MacKenzie · Opened: 1928