Member play has officially begun on the new Beau Welling-designed course at Travis Club, the 1,500-acre private community along Lake Travis about 15 miles west of Austin.
For Welling, who frequently collaborates with Tiger Woods on high-profile design and interactive projects, seeing golfers on the course marked the payoff to a project that presented an unusual combination from the start: a spectacular piece of property that was every bit as challenging as it was inspiring.
“I’ve worked in the Hill Country before, and so the Hill Country is super awesome and exciting,” Welling said during a recent fireside chat. “There’s a terrain and the relief and the drama that you have.”
There’s plenty of it at Travis Club.
The course, which stretches more than
7,300 yards from the back tees, tumbles across a rugged piece of land about 15 miles west of Austin, with steep elevation changes, rocky outcroppings, ravines and holes that offer sweeping views of Lake Travis.
It’s not exactly the kind of property most golfers picture when they think of Texas.
Cloudy day, but this will eventually be the fifth hole at Travis Club, a new golf community to be shaped by @beauwelling near Austin, Texas. The official groundbreaking ceremony was Tuesday. pic.twitter.com/rOjMXFYcy1
— Tim Schmitt (@TMSGolfweek) April 24, 2024
“Especially for Texas, you’ve got a lot of areas that don’t have that much drama, but you have that in the Hill Country,” Welling said. “But at the same time, the geology that builds that drama has some complications, too, in terms of rock and challenge, almost too much topography in some places.”
Welling knew immediately that the land could produce memorable golf. The trick was figuring out how to use all the elevation and movement without building a course that beat up the people who would play it every day.
“I knew there was a great opportunity, given how dramatic the property was, but at the same time, I knew there were a lot of challenges,” Welling said. “How do you develop golf on this kind of terrain?”
That question shaped plenty of the decisions Welling and his team made.
There’s width throughout the course, along with multiple teeing options, slopes that can feed shots onto greens and an effort to eliminate unnecessary forced carries. Better players, meanwhile, are asked to think about angles, positioning and how much risk they’re willing to take. That philosophy perhaps shows up best in a handful of holes.
The 15th, a “big-boy par 5,” as Welling calls it, stretches beyond 600 yards but plays nearly 150 feet downhill.
Then there’s the par-3 fifth along Lake Travis, a hole that seems destined to show up all over social media. From the back tee, it can play 240 yards, slightly downhill across an inlet to a 10,000-square-foot green. Move forward and the forced carry becomes significantly less intimidating, but the lake and the drama remain.
Welling took a similar approach at the closing hole, turning the par 4 into a true cape hole from the back tee. Better players can decide how much they want to bite off, while the other teeing grounds remove the forced carry.
It all gets back to something Welling talked about long before Travis Club opened.
“One of my big deals is human connection and how golf promotes community, and we’re trying to build a community where families and friends can have great times together,” he said. “Who wants to organize your friendships by handicap level? We’re not only trying to create this great place where people of different skill levels can play, we want them to play at the same time and have fun together.”
That was particularly important on land that easily could have produced a brutally difficult golf course.
“It was both super exciting, but also like, wait, there are a lot of challenges,” Welling said. “But knowing the sponsorship of the project and what the vision was like, they gave you a real sense of, hey, this is going to be a super-quality place, and how do we bring our expertise to help make that happen?”
For the club, opening the golf course represents one of the biggest milestones yet in a development that has been decades in the making.
An earlier attempt to develop the property was sidetracked by the 2008 financial crisis. Austin-based Castle Hill Partners became involved in 2021 and is now developing Travis Club with California-based Haas & Haynie Corp.
The community includes nearly two miles of private lakefront and calls for 700 homesites ranging from a half-acre to nearly four acres.
Golf is only part of the larger plan. Travis Club has 10,000 feet of Lake Travis frontage and more than 30 miles of private hiking and biking trails, with plans for a marina and Boat Club, lakefront dining, pools, fitness and wellness facilities, racquet and sport courts and other amenities.
The Golf House, next to the club’s expansive practice facility, is scheduled to open in spring 2027 with a Golf Shop, restaurant and bar, outdoor dining, training facilities and Trackman-equipped hitting bays.
But the most important amenity, and the one that helped sell many of the early members on Travis Club in the first place, is no longer something they have to imagine. They can play it.
“The site for Travis Club offers a truly incredible setting for golf,” Welling said. “With the rolling topography and dramatic landscape along Lake Travis, the golf experience we were able to choreograph is full of drama at every turn.”
Tim Schmitt is the managing editor of Golfweek and the golf coordinator for the USA Today Network.
This article originally appeared on Golfweek: Travis Club opens dramatic Beau Welling course in Texas Hill Country
