Westfields Golf Club

Overview: Westfields Golf Club in Clifton is a Fred Couples Signature design created with Gene Bates on rolling woodland and former farmland in western Fairfax County. The public 18-hole course measures 6,897 yards at par 71 and moves through dense tree-lined fairways, undulating greens and carefully placed hazards. It is more open and playable than the first view of the trees suggests, but forced carries and approach angles still punish a careless line. The absence of homes along the routing gives the course a rare sense of separation near Washington, while the varied ground keeps the holes from reading as a single repeated corridor.

History: Westfields opened in 1998 after a project that had been in planning and permitting for several years. Fred Couples and Gene Bates developed the routing for a site where the owners wanted a high-quality public course rather than a residential layout lined with houses. That decision remains visible today: the course is surrounded by natural landscape, and its identity is tied to the woodland and meadow setting rather than to a built neighborhood. Westfields later became a Certified Audubon Cooperative Sanctuary, adding an environmental-management chapter to its course history.

Did You Know? Westfields is identified by its official course material as Virginia's only Fred Couples Signature Golf Course. It also has no residences lining the holes, so the views remain focused on fairway, woodland, water and sky rather than surrounding construction. The combination gives a Northern Virginia public course an unusually quiet visual setting.