Gil Hanse attended secondary school at Hunter Tannersville High school in Tannersville, New York before gaining his undergraduate degree from the University of Denver. Hanse then earned a Masters degree in Landscape Architecture from Cornell University in 1989.

During his studies at Cornell, Hanse was the recipient of the William Frederick Dreer Award – the same horticultural award that Tom Doak received five years earlier – which allowed him to spend a year overseas with Martin Hawtree's practice, studying the history of golf course architecture.

He spent a short time working with Tom Doak’s Renaissance Golf Design (Hanse was Doak's first employee) before founding Hanse Golf Course Design in 1993. His long term design partner Jim Wagner joined the firm two years later. Along with Tom Doak, Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw, Gil Hanse is regarded as one of the most influential “minimalist” golf course architects of the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

According to his personal portrait on the ASGCA website, Hanse’s company is “based on the principles of creating a small firm that takes a personal interest in the design and construction of each project. The company's courses are simple and elegant in appearance, yet sophisticated in strategy and interest.”

Hanse quickly established himself as a top restoration specialist, with a portfolio of work during the 1990s that included reworking William Flynn’s Kittansett in Massachusetts, A. W. Tillinghast’s Ridgewood in New Jersey, Seth Raynor’s Fishers Island in New York and Donald Ross’s Sakonnet in Rhode Island.

A big break for Hanse came at the end of the 1990s, when he was appointed to design a new 18-hole layout for Crail Golfing Society in Fife, Scotland. There’s no doubt that this commission raised his stature significantly as the Home of Golf hasn’t had too many American architects design courses on its hallowed links turf down the years.

Restoration work for Hanse continued into the new millennium at golf clubs in several other American states, such as Egan’s Waverly in Oregon, Ross’s Oakland Hills in Michigan, Perry Maxwell’s Southern Hills in Oklahoma and Ross’s Aronimink in Pennsylvania.

The architect also conducted a well-regarded renovation of the course at TPC Boston in 2005 which was liked by playing professionals and armchair golfers watching what was then called the Deutsche Bank Championship on television.

More recent high profile renovation work has come the way of Hanse. In Florida, he upgraded the three courses – Blue Monster, Golden Palm and Red Tiger – for Donald Trump at Doral and at Pinehurst in North Carolina he reworked the No. 4 course (co-host along with No.2 for the 2019 US Amateur Championship) to remove more than twenty five pot bunkers and replace them with sprawling, sandy native areas that tie-in seamlessly with their surroundings.

Of course, Hanse is no stranger to working on projects in the public glare, having been chosen to fashion the golf course for the 2016 Rio Olympics in Brazil. He’s also added a third course, the Black, to the highly regarded Streamsong Resort in Florida and he’s now lined up to design the next 18-hole layout that will grace Mike Keiser’s Bandon Dunes Golf Resort in Oregon.

Outside America, Hanse has been involved in a number of interesting golf developments. He began an ongoing restoration plan for Tokyo Golf Club in 2008 before teaming up with Mark Parsinen in Scotland the following year to create the Castle Stuart course near Inverness and he’s since laid out the new course at Trump International Golf Club Dubai in the United Arab Emirates in 2017.

He’s due to finish his first Asian course in Bangkok, Thailand in 2019 and to complete another 18-layout at Les Bordes in France – his first course in Continental Europe – in 2020. There’s also ongoing renovation work at Royal Sydney in Australia and Narin & Portnoo in Ireland so there are plenty of commissions in the pipeline to keep Jim Wagner and his Caveman Construction company gainfully employed for the foreseeable future.

Snippets:

The Hanse ascendancy

Extract from the Hanse Golf Design website:

“During the Rio interview, as Amy Alcott, environmentalist Owen Larkin and I were making our case for why we deserved the project, I noticed rather glumly that the name card on the table stated my name as “Gil Hansen.” I’m quite sure no one on the panel noticed the mistake. When the interview was over, I tucked the card into my briefcase and took it home, where it resides in my office. My wife and kids had it framed and point to it when they feel I’m in jeopardy of my head getting too big.”