Favourite Holes By Design: The Architect’s Choice (2004) comprises fifty-eight essays written by leading golf-course architects from the major golf-playing nations.

Several of the game’s most celebrated holes are featured: the treacherous Road hole at The Old Course, St. Andrews; Pebble Beach’s beguiling seventh; Royal Troon’s diminutive Postage Stamp eighth hole; Ballybunion’s majestic eleventh hole, among them. By nature, golf architects are clinical, reasoned, and articulate. But let’s not forget they are golfers, too, and prone to the internal and external influences that all golfers experience. Tugging at one’s heartstrings, who could discount the affinity that develops between golfer, hole, and course, during one’s early years in the game. Stories of that ilk are interwoven throughout Favourite Holes.   Compare your favourite hole to those of the architects. Hear their passion and learn their knowledge about the hole’s design and mood as it works on the player.

Presenting a list of favourite holes derived solely from the world’s most cherished golf courses would be a lost opportunity. The famous cathedrals of golf, such as, Pine Valley, Royal Melbourne, Shinnecock Hills, Cypress Point, Pebble Beach, St. Andrews Old, don’t have a mortgage on great holes, nor do regulation eighteen-hole layouts. Visit even the rankest of municipal courses, and you’re bound to find one hole that has merit.

Favourite Holes By Design: The Architect’s Choice features a range of holes that vary in composition, difficulty, and appearance. Some entries are unapologetically ‘penal,’ while others are examples of golf holes designed along classical ‘heroic’ and ‘strategic’ lines.