A simple old-school touch

Golf Digest, June, 2001 by Jim Moriaty

In a perfect world, every golf course architect would be strictly hands-on, every project pampered like a prize show dog and every hill and swale as distinctive as a Van Gogh brush stroke. The reality, of course, is that once a designer opens an office and hires a staff, he's as much rainmaker as artist. Unless he's Keith Foster.

The man who was dispatched to Southern Hills when vandals defaced half the greens in 1999, who worked with course superintendent John Szklinski last year in excavating all its bunkers to captivating new depths, has made the ideal of a personal touch his mantra. Just four years ago this former assistant to Arthur Hills had an office in St. Louis with seven employees and a travel log that Lewis and Clark would have found daunting.

His response was to simplify. Foster, 43, now lives on 83 acres in bluegrass Kentucky with his wife, Pam, and their two Brittany spaniels. He walks to work across a rickety log bridge he built to an office in the loft of an old tobacco barn. He sits at an antique partner's desk, but without a partner.

"It became very important to me to work with my clients one-on-one," says Foster, whose projects last year included Coral Canyon in Utah and The Harvester in Iowa. "I wanted them to know that I'm the one drawing it and the one building it."

Part of the drawing includes first-rate renderings done with an old-school touch. Foster fashioned his stylistic routing of Southern Hills (opposite) exclusively for Golf Digest.