Atlantic Golf Club - New York, U.S.A.

Atlantic Golf Club owes its genesis to a weekend visit to the Hamptons by Westchester real estate developer Lowell Schulman in 1988. Schulman decided then and there that he would build a golf course, recognizing that there were limited options for affluent golfers in the Hamptons. Schulman set out to find a suitable piece of property, and that same weekend he looked at the 203-acre Equinox Farm off Scuttlehole Road in Bridgehampton. The site was not ideal for growing potatoes, but was made to order for a golf course-a rolling property with glacially created kettle ponds and a sunken spine of wetlands that is home to the eastern tiger salamander. Schulman hired Rees Jones to design a course that could stand head-fo-head with the East End's Big Three of Shinnecock Hills, National, and Maidstone. Jones created a rigorous but traditional links course, with fairways terraced through the elevation changes, sinewy grass-walled bunkers, and borders of native maritime grasses. Opened in 1992, the course was an immediate success. There are long views over the surrounding fields and from the high point on the course the Atlantic Ocean can be seen four miles to the south.

The Maidstone Club - New York, U.S.A.

The Maidstone Club in East Hampton, on Long Island's fashionable East End, is not considered a particularly tough 0' long course by modern standards, but there is no course that packs more enchantment within its 18 holes. Founded in 1891 as a tennis and bathing club for old-line society members, the grass courts and cabanas along the Atlantic continue as defining features. Golf was introduced in 1894, expanding to 18 holes by 1899. Impressionist Childe Hassam painted early golfers at Maidstone playing along the dunes next to the Atlantic, not far from East Hampton's elmlined Main Street. The Scottish pro Willie Park, Jr., who was closely involved in the original design, was brought back in the early 1920s to reconfigure the course after additional land was acquired in the dunes between Hook Pond and the ocean. Park's design is an intoxicating procession across and around Hook Pond on the fourth through seventh holes and back again on the 16th and 17th. In between is a stretch of the most authentic sand-riddled seaside holes in the United States. The par-three eighth plays across a bulwark of dune that was created by the terrible hurricane of 1938, while the ninth runs through a valley in the dunes, with a slice leaving the golfer to play before a small gallery of gawking sunbathers on the beach.