Conway Farms Golf Club: Patience with Golf and Planning

Cooler By The Lake Nature By Design Timeline
Conway Farms Golf Club: Patience with Golf and Planning

The founders of Conway Farms pictured with the course’s designers. From left to right, Gordon Smith, Dennis Wise, Margaret Hart, Tom Fazio, and Robert Stuart, Jr.

Chicago Tribune, May 18, 1991.

Chicago Tribune, May 18, 1991.

Though the Conway Farms Golf Club was built in 1991, the idea to put a course on early Lake County settler John Conway’s former dairy farm had been germinating for a long time. When three area families, led by Gordon H. Smith, Augustin and Margaret Stuart Hart and Robert D. Stuart Jr., first acquired the land surrounding Conway Road in 1956, they did not necessarily envision a 35-year plan. In the early 1960s, they even commissioned designer Robert Trent Jones to do several different course layouts on the property, which at that time totaled nearly 1,000 acres.The partners encountered a roadblock in 1959, however, when I-94 was constructed through part of their landscape, altering its character. The idea arose to add residential development to the project, and finally, nearly thirty years later, the timing was right.Course architect Thomas Fazio took inspiration from the Old Course at St. Andrews and from New York’s famed Shinnecock Hills in designing Conway Farms. In 1992 his product was named one of the top five new private courses in the country by Golf Digest.
Conway Farms was typical of a surge in residential golf course construction that swept the nation in the 1980s and 1990s. Increasingly active retirees created the demand, and a booming housing market attracted developers. Built at the latter end of the trend, Conway Farms was designed in response to some of the excesses of earlier golf course developments.Architect and land planner Laurence Booth purposely created modest-sized homes and set them at a distance from the course, attempting to preserve the landscape and the feel of open space for both golfers and homeowners. Architect and local resident Laurence Booth organized the homes in the Conway Farms residential development around open space, seeking to preserve the country atmosphere by clustering buildings together.
Conway Farms regularly ranks among the top 10 courses in Illinois and has hosted significant tournaments like the 2009 Western Amateur and the BMW Championship in 2013, 2015 and 2017.