Mackenzie & Ebert

Mackenzie & Ebert is based in Chichester, United Kingdom, and offers new golf course design, feasibility studies, and layout plans and planning applications. Areas served: International.

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Founded

2005

Areas served

International

Based in

Chichester

Visit website (opens in a new tab) mackenzieandebert.com

If you run an established club or are planning a new course, Mackenzie & Ebert gives you a firm of golf course architects in Chichester, in the United Kingdom that designs new courses and advises existing ones. Its principals, Tom Mackenzie and Martin Ebert, set up the company in 2005 after 15 years as lead designers at Donald Steel & Company, and the firm says it now advises all ten Open Championship venues. It is listed among our golf course architects and in golf course construction and design.

What you get on a new course

You deal with the same designers from start to finish, because the company says Tom and Martin take full responsibility for their own designs. Its stages are below.

• A feasibility study on the land, clubhouse sites, soil, drainage and cost
• A layout plan showing achievable length and standard, for talks with planners
• Planning support drawing on more than 30 courses taken through planning, with ecologists and archaeologists brought in on complex schemes
• Detailed AutoCAD design from a topographical survey, often by drone, with earthwork volumes calculated
• A specification including your agronomist’s input, then contractor tendering and a recommendation
• Frequent site visits and sign-off of contractor payments, then help hiring greenkeeping staff before opening

The firm says its scaled plans let contractors build accurately the first time, which it credits for finishing projects on time and within budget. Photo visualizations by chief operating officer Chris Huggett help you present proposals to committees.

Advice for historic and established courses

If your course has a long history, the firm first traces its evolution through old aerial photography and press cuttings. It reviews bunker placement so longer hitters are still tested while less able golfers keep room to play, and it can reshape parts of greens lost to modern green speeds so original hole locations return. Its team page says it advises 46 courses in Golf World’s Top 100 UK & Ireland and 33 in Golf Digest’s World Top 100 outside the USA.

Championship and international projects

You can see its work at Turnberry, where it made all the changes to the Ailsa Course before The Open in 2009, and at Royal Portrush, where it added two new holes to the Dunluce Course in place of the old 17th and 18th. At Royal Liverpool it made alterations ahead of The Open in 2023, including a new par 3 played as the 17th, and in 2022 Royal Birkdale appointed it consulting architect. In Japan it restored Hirono, Charles Hugh Alison’s 1931 design, rebuilding every green and reforming every bunker, and the restored course opened on October 1, 2019.

Our guide on how to choose a golf course architect and builder may help when you compare firms. Other course design firms listed here include Clayton, DeVries & Pont, MJ Abbott and Contour Golf.

Source: www.mackenzieandebert.com/Services, www.mackenzieandebert.com/Staff, www.mackenzieandebert.com/OpenCourses, www.mackenzieandebert.com/