Irish Creek Golf Course make top 10 list in Golfweek
Published 12:00 am Wednesday, December 2, 2009
By Emily Ford
eford@salisburypost.com
KANNAPOLISóThe Club at Irish Creek has been named one of the 10 best new golf courses in the country.
The former Kannapolis Country Club earned a spot on Golfweek magazine’s list of the best courses that have opened in the past two years.
Irish Creek is an upscale residential community that will provide high-end housing for the N.C. Research Campus, a burgeoning $1.5 billion biotechnology hub in downtown Kannapolis.
“Getting national recognition is a huge honor, especially when you consider the incredible competition we were up against,” said Bill Norton, spokesman for campus developer Castle & Cooke North Carolina.
Golfweek ranked Irish Creek as No. 5 among America’s best new private courses and No. 9 in the nation overall, six spots behind the course that will host the U.S. Open in 2015.
No other golf course in the Charlotte or Triangle regions has received this distinction, Norton said.
Golfweek architecture editor Bradley Klein wrote that the course “has an instant classic lookóit’s hard to find a site where you can get away with that. It has a feel that it has been there a long time.”
Designed by Davis Love III, the course ranked higher than several new high-end private courses in the Southeast, including the Cliffs’ Jack Nicklaus course at Keowee (No. 33), Tom Fazio’s Hasentree in Raleigh (No. 24) and Reynold’s Plantation’s Creek Club (No. 19).
The publicity will help Irish Creek’s real estate sales, Norton said.
“If you’re going to invest in a home on a golf course, you want to know that you live on one of the best courses around,” he said.
The developer plans 585 luxury homes at Irish Creek, built in several phases. The development is located in Landis and the Rowan County portion of Kannapolis.
So far, Castle & Cooke has sold 19 homesites for $2.7 million and has 11 more homesites under contract for $1.9 million.
Considering the stalled economy, Norton said he’s pleased that Irish Creek builders have eight homes under construction, “which is more than in most communities.”
Homes are priced from $795,000 to $1.4 million.
Love’s design, his first in the greater Charlotte area, includes two miles of shoreline along 400-acre Kannapolis Lake. Because of the site’s dramatic contour, the lake is visible from 16 of the 18 holes.
Research Campus founder David Murdock, who owns Castle & Cooke and Dole Food Co., selected Love Golf Design because he wanted a walkable course that would reinforce the campus emphasis on nutrition and health.
Irish Creek also could earn a coveted spot on Golfweek’s list of the top 100 courses of the modern era, which would put it in the top 1 percent of courses built since 1960.
Klein has called Irish Creek a “very strong candidate” for that list in 2009.