PGA Course Proposed for Calabasas
A PGA Tour-built stadium golf course that will be the site of a PGA Tour or PGA Senior Tour event is the centerpiece of the proposed 13,000-acre Ahmanson Ranch development in Calabasas.
The course plans, unveiled Wednesday by PGA Tour golf course architect Bobby Weed, call for a golf layout measuring nearly 7,000 yards to be built among the hills and ravines of the rugged Santa Monica Mountains just east of Las Virgenes Road.
Weed has designed several stadium courses for the PGA, including Summerlin near Las Vegas, site of the Las Vegas Invitational, and River Highlands in Hartford, Conn., site of the Greater Hartford Open.
The course, like 11 others built by the PGA Tour, will be managed by that organization, which will either own the course from the outset of construction or have an option to purchase it from the developers later.
“The signature to my courses is to work with the natural features of the land,” Weed said. “Ridges will become natural spectator areas. The one component I stress is to blend the courses into the land as naturally as possible.”
Weed and PGA Tour publicist Richard Bowers, who also attended the news conference near the site of the proposed course, said the PGA Tour requires that any course it builds become the site of a PGA tournament as soon after completion as possible.
Bowers and Weed would not speculate on whether the course would become the site of an existing tournament, such as the Los Angeles Open, or whether a new tournament would be created.
Organizers of the Los Angeles Open have been considering alternative sites for that event in recent years because of increasing opposition to it by members of the private Riviera Country Club in Pacific Palisades, the tournament site for the past several decades.
The proposed course on the Ahmanson Ranch would be classified as a resort course, open only to guests of the planned hotel-resort project officials want to build adjacent to the course.
The project would include 2,700 homes, along with some apartments and commercial buildings.
The proposal for the development, introduced more than two years ago, goes before a public hearing in Ventura on Dec. 10. The Ventura County Planning Commission and Board of Supervisors are scheduled to make their final decision later this month.
