Dornick Hills Country Club

Dornick Hills in Ardmore, Oklahoma, is Perry Maxwell's very first golf course, begun in 1914 as a four-hole layout on his dairy farm and expanded to 18 over the following decade. Maxwell went on to design Prairie Dunes in Kansas, consult on Augusta National's greens, and establish himself as one of the most distinctive green-builders in American architecture. Dornick Hills is where the language started. Renovations in the 1980s had softened the bold contours that made Maxwell's greens legendary. Tom Doak, one of the foremost living experts on Perry Maxwell's methods, called those 1980s renovations 'one of the biggest tragedies in golf course architecture in his lifetime' in one of his books. When the club contacted Doak about restoration in 2020, he accepted the work without payment. Using eyewitness testimony, old aerial photography, and his own ability to read the same terrain Maxwell did, Doak's Renaissance Golf Design restored the greens to as close as possible to the original 1914-1925 profiles, plus new bunkers, tee adjustments, and irrigation overhauls. For anyone who cares about golf design history, Dornick Hills is a pilgrimage course, Maxwell's very first routing, brought back by the architect best equipped to understand it. A genuinely unique entry on any Oklahoma trip.