Aldarra Golf Club

Overview: Aldarra Golf Club occupies the rolling former Aldarra Farms property east of Seattle, where Tom Fazio shaped an 18-hole par-71 course around wetlands, mountain streams, old-growth timber and views toward Mount Si and the Cascades. The 6,645-yard layout is deliberately free of homes along the playing corridors, so the landscape and the sequence of holes carry the experience. Fairway width, drainage and green placement give the course a distinctly Northwest character while preserving the strategic clarity associated with Fazio.

History: The club grew from a group of Seattle golfers who began searching for a place to build a pure golf club in the 1990s. The founders purchased the Boeing family’s Aldarra Farms in 1997, construction began in April 1999, and the course opened on May 4, 2001. The property had earlier been Walldale Farm, a working farm established by J.F. Duthie in 1915, with a recreation center that included golf and other activities. That older agricultural history remains visible in the surviving generating-plant shell beside the ninth green.

Did You Know? Aldarra’s founders set out to create a core golf experience without houses crowding the holes or a long list of unrelated amenities. The club also became Tom Fazio’s first course in the Pacific Northwest, a milestone he described as important because the project would represent his design firm in the region.