Panther National Golf Club is Florida’s new-maximalist golf playground

PALM BEACH GARDENS, Fla. – The land dictates everything about what a golf course is – and is not – going to be.

Not every new course gets the benefit of existing rolling, sandy terrain like the sites architects like Tom Doak, Bill Coore & Ben Crenshaw have built their careers using for their creations.

When faced with hundreds of acres of pancake-flat land – a completely blank canvas – what should a developer do?

At Panther National Golf Club, a brand-new private community 30 minutes west of Palm Beach proper, the answer was to build big – bigger than anything most golfers have ever seen.

One of the most extensively shaped golf courses ever built, Panther National represents a contemporary take on the maximalist approach to golf course design that characterized much of the 1980s, 1990s and early 2000s.