The Swing Plane

The Art of Golf

Cherchez la femme— on the links? French designer Robert Berthet has turned golf course design on its head. by Jolee Edmondson

WHEN FRENCH GOLF course architect Robert Berthet talks, people listen—with raised eyebrows and dropped jaws. The 55-year-old, Paris-based designer of more than 40 layouts creates not typical tees and greens but elaborately conceived theme courses rife with symbols. Call him the Walt Disney of Gallic golf, or call him eccentric. Berthet’s proposals are invariably met with a resounding “Qu’est-ce que c’est?” That’s French for “Huh?”

Take, for example, the time in 1986 that he presented a plan to build a golf course in the shape of a woman. “They stopped breathing,” he says, recalling the reaction.

As perhaps only a Frenchman would, Berthet (pronounced “bare-TAY”) had long entertained the notion of imposing a female figure onto an appropriate parcel of land, with elevations, bunkers and rough representing anatomical features mentionable and unmentionable. His vision was realized when he was commissioned to fashion an 18-hole layout in the white wine–rich Mâcon region of Burgundy. It was amour at first sight when he surveyed the rolling, verdant, vineyard-framed property. What better canvas for his fairway femme than this lush, sensuous wine-growing hub?

“I suddenly told myself, ‘This is the place for my anatomy links,’” recalls Berthet with the intensity of a master sculptor. “‘It is here. I have to do it here.’”

The project’s board of directors fell silent when he proffered his blueprint, their faces etched with bewilderment. “But in 15 minutes,” he says, “I got them to grasp my concept. I had to prove to them that it was not a complete madness of sexuality.”

Today, players at the quaint Golf de Mâcon la Salle earnestly chase par over the links equivalent of a Playboy centerfold. A bit sexist, maybe? Berthet balks at the suggestion. “How can art be sexist?” he retorts.

Other eyebrow-raising designs by Berthet include Digne la Lavande in the city of Digne les Bains (a renowned mecca of paleontology), where fairways are shaped like bones and bunkers resemble gigantic fossils; and Cap Skirring Golf Course, a Club Med layout on the Senegal coast, where fairways crest and roll like waves and bunkers conjure great splashes of foamy surf. (“It is like playing on the sea,” explains Berthet.)

Still on the drawing board is an “agricultural links,” targeted for the countryside near Evian, which will replicate the patchwork terrain of a farm, integrating fairways and greens with orchards, fields of crops and meadows with grazing sheep that double as hazards.

“I will someday do a butterfly course,” says Berthet, who feels that such a layout would be ideal for Taiwan, known as the “Kingdom of Butterflies,” where these creatures have special meaning. “The clubhouse will be the body of the insect, and the holes will spread out from there like wings, with round greens symbolizing the ocelli, or eyespots.”

So unconventional is Berthet’s philosophy on golf course design that he turns up his nose at the works of revered American counterparts Tom Fazio, Jack Nicklaus and the late Robert Trent Jones. “You can instantly recognize their golf courses by certain characteristics,” he says dismissively. “That, I think, is a weakness.”

One of only 10 golf course architects in France, the tall, dapper Berthet asserts that he would have left the business long ago had he been confined to designing links typique. “I am bored with traditional golf courses,” he declares with a touch of hauteur. “They have no personality. It is important to make each site talk. A golf course must incorporate the thing that makes its location unique. That is why a theme is crucial.”

Berthet’s startling style is partly attributable to his desire to wake up his country’s somnolent golf scene. “The French have never associated golf with fun,” he observes. “I am hoping that my courses will change that perception.”

While growing in popularity among French citizens, golf is far from being the near-obsession it has become in other European countries and in the United States. The French overwhelmingly favor tennis as a weekend diversion (some 400,000 play golf, as opposed to almost 2 million tennis players). Of the 523 links that dot the French landscape, many—if not most—are ordinaire, with facilities to match. Moreover, the sport has a lingering image problem. Although numerous courses have gone public since the early 1980s, golf is still considered something of an elitist pastime off-limits to the population at large.

In France, the golf experience is more charming than gung-ho, which might explain why a Pierre has never won the Masters. Absent is the killer instinct that fuels American golfers. Booming drives and slam-dunked 10-footers are nice, but here it’s the walk that’s important, not to mention the vintage grape at the 19th hole.

Exemplifying the laid-back attitude of French golfers is the annual Golf et Degustation competition held at the aforementioned Golf de Mâcon la Salle. For one weekend every August, the course turns into a virtual picnic ground. While the players vie for prizes—mainly golf apparel and pricey bottles of pinot this and cuvée that—the real focus is on tasting and sipping. At each tee is a tent featuring choice regional wines, luscious fromages and such specialties of Bourgogne as escargots and jambon persillé—ham in parsleyed aspic. Foursomes lounge in the grass while indulging, unfazed by the botched shots and bogeys that have gone before and with nary a concern about strategy on the next hole.

If anything can give French golf a shot in the derrière, it might well be Berthet’s latest production: Dunkerque Golf Course (pictured above), a stark, windswept, municipal track that literally turns the game into a turf war. Located about three miles inland from the roiling North Sea, in the ancient French port of Dunkirk, this 27-hole battlefield replicates a fearsome 17th-century fortress. Golfers ascend narrow escarpments (fairways) and shoot over moats, stone walls and vegetation-covered ramparts to precipice-bounded, citadel-like greens that surrender nothing. Tall stands of trees atop steep inclines represent turrets and parapets. “Golfers feel like soldiers on the attack!” exclaims Berthet.

The people of Dunkirk thought he was crazy when he introduced his plan. Nothing new there. “The only person who believed in it was the mayor,” he says. “He got it right away. He appreciated that I wanted to design a golf course based on the area’s history.”

Berthet had done his homework, devoting long hours to the study of the dense chain of fortifications and walled towns that were built along Dunkirk’s rugged coastline during the reign of Louis XlV, who commissioned brilliant military engineer Sébastien le Prestre de Vauban to construct innovatively impregnable garrisons as a defense against Spanish invaders.

“Vauban was my inspiration,” states Berthet.

Among the avant-garde designer’s current projects is an 18-hole course in the flourishing aerospace center of Toulouse in southwestern France, long known as “Ville Rose” (Pink City) for its distinctive brick architecture. Berthet’s reluctance to divulge his intended theme for the Toulouse track sparks a flurry of wild imaginings. Will there be bunkers filled with pink sand? Or maybe tees resembling launch pads for space capsules? Fairways shaped like the Concorde and a clubhouse that serves as air traffic control for flying golf balls?

One thing’s certain: It won’t be like any golf course France has seen before.

Sky contributor Jolee Edmondson, who writes often about golf, has played Berthet’s female-shaped course in Burgundy, where she bogeyed an arm, a leg and several unmentionables.

photo Courtesy of Robert Berthet Architect, Illustration courtesy of Archigolf