Mungo Park Architects and architects 3DReid have announced a joint venture to provide a golf specific architectural service. Mungo Park Architects + 3DReid Golf & Leisure will combine MPA’s specialist golf clubhouse design expertise with 3DReid’s international hotel, leisure and masterplanning experience to offer clubs and resort developers around the world a holistic service.
Mungo Park said: “This is an exciting collaboration for our practice and clients. The overlap is clear; 3DReid provides exactly the sort of competencies that we wish to offer existing golf clubs and new developers. From 3DReid’s point of view we hope to provide an added area of specialism to their established leisure sector.”
He continued: “In an increasingly competitive golf market, club owners and operators need to develop strategies that provide added value in the clubhouse and ensure a satisfactory revenue stream, while providing the sort of facilities and ambience that discerning golfers seek in a modern club.”
Gordon Ferrier, Head of 3DReid’s Hotel Sector Group said: “The worldwide appeal of golf is clear in many of the international resorts we are being asked to look at. To be able to offer specialist golf facility design will give us a distinct advantage.”
The new JV also plans to push the sustainability message, which is increasingly becoming and important item on golf club agendas. Many clubhouses, built in the ‘golfing boom’ years of the 1920’s, are coming to the end of their useful life, with their internal and external ‘diagrams’ confused by successive unsympathetic extensions. Mungo Park Architects + 3DReid are keen to ensure that for cultural and sustainable reasons existing buildings are rationalised and refurbished wherever possible. However, where it is not sensible to retain existing sub-standard clubhouses, MPA+3DReid will ensure that a new building or extension satisfies the highest achievable reduction in carbon footprint.
“Many clubs are in an ideal position to incorporate substantial sources of renewable energy and energy efficiency measures”, says Stuart Barlow, Head of Sustainabilty at 3DReid, “and we are able to offer the practical experience of many large public projects, particularly in the hotel and leisure sectors, to ensure that they can do so effectively.”
MPA has been providing golf clubhouse design consultancy for 20 years, since winning their first major commission, in competition with Law Dunbar Naismith and Quinlan Terry in 1990 for the design of The Oxfordshire. Among the 30 clubs they have advised, clients include the Honourable Company of Edinburgh Golfers (Muirfield), The Royal Liverpool Golf Club (Hoylake), North Wilts G C, Sunningdale G C, Temple G C and Gullane G C
Mungo Park Architects has worked successfully with many landscape architects and ecologists, and with golf course architects Donald Steel, Martin Hawtree, Simon Gidman, and Howard Swan among others to ensure that the clubhouse and the golf course are responsibly integrated in the local environment.
Mungo Park is the great grandson of Willie Park, the first winner of the Open Championship in 1860.
3DReid are award-winning international architects with offices across the UK as well as Abu Dhabi, Dubai and Kuala Lumpur
They are the architects for the recently refurbished and iconic Turnberry Hotel, which hosted the 2009 Open Championship and are working on numerous hotel, leisure and resort developments across the globe.
3DReid www.3DReid.com
Mungo Park Architects www.mungo-park.co.uk