Brian Curley
Profile
Brian Curley is a partner in the Arizona based firm of Schmidt-Curley Golf Design, which is an extraordinarily prolific company working predominantly in the Asian region. The company designed and built ten of the courses at the Mission Hills Resort outside of Shenzhen China, and have recently completed another ten courses for the same client at the new Mission Hills Haikou Resort, on Hainan Island. Prior to the shutdown of golf development in China, they were also planning another multi-course project for the same client outside of Kunming, in Yunnan Province. Separate to their arrangement with Mission Hills, the design team is busy with work on plenty of other developments across the region. In 2016 they began work on another ten-course project in Vietnam.
Brian Curley started in design by working with Pete Dye, having a hand in key projects like Teeth of the Dog, Kiawah Island Ocean Course and PGA West Stadium Course. Like Lee Schmidt, he has considerable experience in Asia and although the concept of mass-producing golf courses for signature celebrities should be hard to digest, you can’t blame the architects for the wishes of their client. As a designer, Curley is about as daring and innovative as they come and the fact that he has been able to build quality courses whilst working at break-neck speed across China suggests he is a talented course creator. When given artistic freedom or the time required to finish a golf course properly, the results are substantial, but more often than not Schmidt Curley clients are in too much of a hurry to allow a design to be polished as they would have liked. The best courses at Mission Hills Haikou are impressive and the fact that the first nine layouts were built in less than two years shows the sort of speeds these guys have been worked. One hopes that as the China rush subsides they will concentrate further on quality over quantity and find the time needed to build more Lava Fields' and less Duvals'.
To contact Schmidt-Curley Golf Design, or for an independent assessment of their suitability for your project, please contact Global Golf Group.
