Czech Golf Design

Casa Serena golf course was designed to become a part of the Roztez chateaux complex, the European seat of Mr. Terry Gou, an owner of the Foxconn international concern, the world’s largest producer of electronics. The course, that is entirely private and is only available to play upon personal invitation from Foxconn, has been situated in a typical Czech countryside landscape in the vicinity of the chateaux.

Jakub Červenka was hired by the company Foxconn as Project Manager and Site Coordinator. His major scope of responsibility laid in finalising the somewhat problematic issue of ownership rights, namely in regards to purchase of the remaining lots of land and in obtaining all required construction permits working with an appointed expert, all of which was vital to the completion of the project. He further had to negotiate with relevant state offices, organise tenders for an architect of the course and a supplier of the construction services as well as perform daily QA of the work done during the construction phase of the golf resort development. He was also in charge of supervising the drawing-down of the allocated funds.

England’s European Golf Design became the appointed designer of the project. Its assignment was to design a course of the best achievable quality and built it in a way that would allow hosting professional tours of PGA Europe. The finished golf course has the length of 6364 metres (3.95 miles) upon PAR 71. Greens and teeing areas were built using the USGA method. Throughout the entire construction period, a huge emphasis was placed on the quality of the performed construction work and integration of the course in the surrounding landscape in a harmonic way. These requests called for a number of changes while performing the actual construction when compared with the final approved layout. We took part in performing the changes together with the architect of the course. The biggest change in our opinion was the change of placement of the sixth green which was moved to allow for keeping a stunning oak tree alley surrounding a local access road. Other partial changes we performed together with the architect were changes of the overall layouts of the first and eighth greens to link them better to the following teeing areas of the second and ninth hole, resp. over a neighbouring biotope. The transition is done by a 110 metre-long (120 yards) wooden footbridge built without use of heavy machinery. Another interesting element from the golf course construction perspective are the cart paths built in the entire area from interlocking cobbles.

The golf course has been designed as two nine-hole loops both starting and ending in front of the club house. This model has been applied with regards to organising professional tours where the participants start in intervals from both teeing areas simultaneously. Deep bunkers and perfectly shaped fairways are other interesting aspects of the course from the aesthetic point of view. To play at Casa Serena involves thorough planning of each stroke and its placement from a strategic point of view in order to use the landscape disparity and breaks in the best way.

Additional reading: Jakub Červenka’s interview with the golf course main architect Robin Hiseman (European Golf Design) not only focused at the Casa Serena course, but also discussing other golf-related issues, in the section Publishing Activities.

Casa Serena has been voted the best golf course in the Czech Republic by the professional public. Since 2008, the course has been hosting the tournaments of the EuropeanSenior PGA Tour towards the end of August and beginning of September. The agreement has been concluded for 3 years.