Getting All wet

By Trent Bouts

By transforming a waste area to a water feature, The Club at Carlton Woods solved a maintenance problem and secured a lucrative real estate sale

Bill Langley’s enthusiasm is palpable when he recites the benefits of transforming a waste bunker to a water feature at The Club at Carlton Woods in The Woodlands, Texas. The $70,000 project resolved an ongoing maintenance headache, helped sell a high-dollar homesite, created a wildlife haven and provided thematic inspiration for the club’s second course.
 
“And it turned a really good golf hole into a great golf hole,” says Langley, the club’s general manager. “It was an absolute win all around.”

The Club at Carlton Woods, a high-end private development just north of downtown Houston, opened its Jack Nicklaus signature course in June 2001. Membership had barely topped 100 when two factors converged to draw attention to the par-3 No. 17—or, more specifically, to a five-acre waste bunker stretching along the left side of the hole.

Almost from the outset, the bunker was subject to washouts that required repairs and sand restoration. When Eric Bauer, the club’s course superintendent, studied the problem, he found that in addition to errant shots, the bunker was swallowing nearly $6,000 annually in maintenance costs. Around the same time, the club’s sales staff identified prospective buyers for a lot near the hole but couldn’t close the deal, partly because the location featured no water view.
 
Then, someone suggested turning the waste bunker into a wetland and the idea was quickly judged to have enough merit to take it to the Nicklaus Design team. “When you invest in having someone like Mr. Nicklaus design your golf course, you don’t want to do anything that interferes with how he wants the golf course to play,” Bauer says. “So we were very careful to ensure that he signed off on the change.”

Any trepidation about how the suggestion would be received quickly disappeared when it became apparent that the designers had already considered creating a lake out of the area in question. With the designer on board, the club took the proposal to members.
 
“Members don’t always look at a big area of sand like that and see that there’s any cost involved in having it there,” says Bauer, who e-mailed members regularly during the project. “It was very important to identify those costs. Once we did, anyone opposing the change quickly saw the savings we would make in the long term.”

Bauer’s next step was to seek expert advice. Brian Kruger, an official with Apache Ecological Services, helped plan construction and the aquatic plantings that would be incorporated into the design. Creating littoral shelves at varied depths made the wetland suitable for a wide variety of aquatic plants. Those plants provided not just a range of color and texture, but also habitat for a wide variety of wildlife, including birds, reptiles and amphibians.

Today, The Club at Carlton Woods has increased its membership to approximately 470 members and, according to Langley, the old waste bunker is barely an echo for any of them. Instead, No. 17 is regarded as one of the most challenging and photogenic on the golf course. What’s more, the plant buffering around the wetland has been emulated on other parts of the course, where previously maintained turf ran to the water’s edge. The club even uses the wetland during summer camp classes for members’ children and also drew on it while obtaining certification under the Audubon Cooperative Sanctuary Program.

“What was once a challenge in getting water out of a neighborhood with multi-million dollar homes is now a thing of beauty,” Langley says. “The wetland has helped bring to the golf course some of the appeal of Bear Branch Lake, which is just outside the property. There’s no access to the lake, but the wildlife has certainly been attracted to the wetland.”

But perhaps the wetland’s most dramatic influence comes on another golf course altogether: the club’s second layout, a design created by Tom Fazio that opened in October 2005. According to both Langley and Bauer, Fazio’s team was so impressed with the atmosphere of the wetland that they used it as inspiration on the new course. Langley cites a wetland between Nos. 10 and 13 and another alongside No. 14 as examples.

“I would think this model is absolutely one that other courses could use to enhance their property and maybe solve some issues at the same time,” Langley says.
 
Bauer agrees, adding that creating wetlands can generate flexibility during new course construction. “But what I really hope this has done is provide one more example of how golf is a good environmental citizen. A lot of people have this perception that golf is bad in that way, but the opposite is true and we need to speak up about it.”

Trent Bouts is a South Carolina-based freelance writer and editor of Palmetto Golfer magazine.