Poppy Hills Golf Course Review

The Poppy Hills Golf Course is located in Pebble Beach, California and, as the saying goes, that translates into the best zip code in golf. The course is built upon a beautiful piece of forested land and the layout wears the signature of the famous golf-architect Robert Trent Jones Jr. After an extensive renovation job ended in 2014, the Poppy Hills Golf Course plays firm and fast, due to the state of the art irrigation system which was put into place, together with the high-tech water mapping and the 8 inches of sand capping. Truth be told, nowadays balls really bounce in the fairways. The design of the golf course was also tweaked, as in improved, by removing the mounding which was all the rage back in the eighties when the course was initially built (1986 to be more precise) and now the trees are cleared, opening lines of play.

The restoration included redoing all the greens and the bunkers and after the upgrade, the Poppy Hills Golf Course can be safely described as Poppy 2.0. Everything has changed for the better, the fairways are now much wider and the bunker patterns are now more strategic than ever. After Jones basically re-invented the course from an architectural point of view, by restoring all of its holes to their natural elevation, along with softening contours and doglegs and re-constructing all the greens using bent grass and eliminating rough, the end result is a fast, firm and fun to play golf course that stretches seamlessly over the stunning Del Monte forest.