Cutalong at Lake Anna

If there is one complaint to be made about The Architects Golf Club — a New Jersey club where former Golf Digest courses editor Ron Whitten paid tribute to the history of golf course architecture with holes based on the most famous designers — it’s that it ends too early, with Robert Trent Jones providing the last bit of chronological inspiration.

Architect Tom Clark joins Whitten at Cutalong at Lake Anna, a golf club accompanying a planned community north of Richmond, Virginia, and although that designer pays plenty of homage to old-world architects of the UK, he also brings more modern perspectives to this collection of holes inspired by classic holes.

One example is No. 5, a hole that salutes Pete Dye in its incorporation of both waste bunkers and those held up with railroad ties, before finishing with a boomerang green. Among the Golden Age architects celebrated here, perhaps none gets more love than Alister MacKenzie, who receives a nod in the “Gibraltar” par three, as well as other features around the course.

The Clark/Whitten duo bust out the blender for No. 14, a par five that grabs inspiration across eras and continents alike. The tee shot presents a Lido “Channel” tee shot to multiple fairways...getting home in two means riding the left-side out-of-bounds all the way to the green (a la Coore & Crenshaw’s No. 2 at Talking Stick’s O’odham) and finally, the green itself is an obvious Road Hole acknowledgement. Bring a notebook and learn something along the way!