Frankfurter Golf Club

Overview: Frankfurter Golf Club is an 18-hole parkland course in the Stadtwald at Niederrad, close to the centre of Frankfurt. Designed by Harry S. Colt, it is listed at par 71 and 6,515 yards. The course is woven into the city's forest landscape, where mature trees, former channels of the Main and diagonal sand dunes shape the setting and the strategy. The routing asks for a precise start and then builds towards a demanding return, with the club describing the eighteenth as the visual climax because the Frankfurt skyline appears beyond the tee. The course feels peaceful because of its woodland setting, yet its history and tournament standard are never far away. Rather than relying on dramatic earthworks, it makes the existing landscape do the architectural work, using angles, tree lines, sandy ground and green positions to reward careful planning.

History: The Frankfurter Golf Club was founded in 1913 and first played on a nine-hole course at Hofgut Goldstein. In 1927 Harry S. Colt built the new 18-hole parkland course in the Frankfurt Stadtwald, and the club moved to the current area during 1927 and 1928. The English country-house-style clubhouse was completed in 1929. The course survived the disruption of the war years and later periods of occupation, and the club resumed a long championship tradition after 1956. In 2006 and 2007, Christoph Städler renewed the greens and bunkers in the character of Colt's design without changing the original routing, keeping the historic layout recognizable while restoring key playing surfaces.

Did You Know? The club says that not a single hole has been moved since the course was established in 1927 and 1928. That makes the walk through the Stadtwald unusually direct contact with a historic Colt routing, while the view from the eighteenth tee adds Frankfurt's modern skyline to the closing hole.