Robert Trent Jones Jr: listening to the land

Who he is

Robert Trent Jones Jr., known as Bob, was born on 24 July 1939 in Montclair, New Jersey, the son of the architect Robert Trent Jones Sr. His brother Rees is also a golf course architect. He learned the game at Winged Foot Golf Club from the teacher Tommy Armour, who, his firm says, captured his imagination with the game’s folklore.

At Yale he studied geology and majored in history and American studies, and played on the university golf team. He graduated in 1961.

Off the course he has been president of the American Society of Golf Course Architects (1989–1990) and a member, then chairman, of the California State Parks and Recreation Commission. He was inducted into the California Golf Hall of Fame in 1991 and received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the European PGA in 2010. He lives in Woodside, California.

How he came to design

After a year of law school at Stanford, he dropped out to join his father’s firm, rose to vice-president and took charge of its west-coast operations in 1962. In the 1960s he worked alongside his father on Spyglass Hill Golf Club in Pebble Beach, and later expanded into Asia with solo international projects.

In 1972 he left the family firm and founded Robert Trent Jones II Golf Course Architects, based in Palo Alto, California. His first solo project was Princeville Makai on the north shore of Kauai, in Hawaii. Seven years later the Northern California Golf Association chose him to design Poppy Hills, near his father’s Spyglass Hill.

His design ideas

Bob is known as an early advocate of environmentally sensitive golf course design, and his mantra is “to listen to the land.” His firm puts it plainly: “we listen to the land first, then we speak.” It adds that a good site hides a cultural and historical legacy that must be honoured before a single stone is moved.

“The very best courses are those where nature has provided the canvas and my job is to discover her secrets and reveal them,” he has said. He also writes: he is the author of Golf by Design, a book that helps players read a course layout, as well as a journalist and poet.

His aim, in his own words, is to design courses “that will fascinate people so they’ll want to play them many times and learn the depths and meanings of the courses’ stories, their subtext, their poetry.” At Penha Longa, the club says, every hole on the Atlantic course is different and exciting.

On ULTIMATE Golf

Penha Longa, in the Sintra-Cascais Natural Park, is a 27-hole resort designed by Bob. The Atlantic course opened in 1992 and staged the Portuguese Open two years later; Jones used the contours to great effect, and the views reach the coastal towns of Cascais and Estoril and the Atlantic beyond. The nine-hole Monastery course followed in 1995. It is less undulating, with fast greens and narrow fairways.

In Barbados, Royal Westmoreland has a par-72 course of 7,045 yards designed by Bob, on the island’s west coast, with a driving range and a short game academy. The estate describes itself as private, with golfing access for villa owners or rental guests.

Our advice: if you play both courses at Penha Longa, take the Atlantic first and the shorter Monastery after lunch, to see how one architect shapes two very different tests.