Morfontaine
- Gunnar Kobin
- Apr 25
- 6 min read
I got to play Morfontaine because I was competing in the Senior European Amateur Championships. That's the only reason I'm writing this post. Morfontaine is one of the most exclusive private clubs in the world. There are 450 members. You don't book a tee time. You don't send an email and ask politely. You don't pay a green fee. You play because someone invites you, and the easiest way for me to get an invitation was to qualify for a tournament that the club hosts. Which I did. So that's how I ended up walking through the famous iron gates of Golf de Morfontaine on a sunny morning, with a tournament tee time on the card and a slightly nervous feeling in my stomach.
You read about the gate before you ever see it. There's a stone wall, a pair of iron gates with an intercom, and a long winding drive through pine forest. The website calls it discreet. I'd call it deliberately understated. The whole place is designed to make you feel like you've entered somewhere private, which obviously you have, because you have. The clubhouse is an old ivy-covered building that looks more like a French country house than a golf clubhouse. There's no glass-fronted modern restaurant. There's no merchandising mega-shop. There's a small pro shop that, according to other reviews I've read, frustrates collectors because it doesn't stock the kind of logo merchandise people want to take home. I left without buying anything because there wasn't much to buy.
Some background. The club was founded in 1913 by Armand de Gramont, the Duke of Guiche, who built a 9-hole course on what had been a polo field. Tom Simpson designed it. Simpson was an English aristocrat who had gone to Cambridge, briefly practised law, then turned to golf course design and ended up creating some of the most respected courses in Europe. Cruden Bay. Ballybunion (the renovation). Chantilly. Fontainebleau. Morfontaine is generally considered his masterpiece. The 9-hole Vallière course came first. The full 18-hole Grand Parcours opened in 1927.
Kyle Phillips did some sympathetic modernisation work between 2005 and 2016 on holes 3, 5, 6, 10, 12, and 14. The same Kyle Phillips who designed Yas Links and worked on Kingsbarns. The fact that the club brought him in to update Simpson's work tells you something about how seriously they take this place.
I played the Grand Parcours. The Vallière is its own thing and I didn't have time for it during the tournament week. I'll come back for that some day if the opportunity presents itself, which it might not.
The course is a par 70 of about 6,000 metres. That's short by modern standards. Morfontaine doesn't care. Length is not the point. Tom Simpson believed that fairway bunkers were a kind of laziness in design, that they acted as visual aids that helped golfers judge distance and pick lines. So he didn't use them much. What you get instead is a course defined almost entirely by trees, contours, and the most beautifully shaped greens in inland golf.
Conditions were perfect the day I played. Sunny, dry, light breeze, the kind of late summer day where everything looks washed in soft light. I'd seen photographs of Morfontaine in mist (which is apparently the classic vibe and what every photographer hopes for) and I'll admit I was slightly disappointed not to get the misty version. Then I started playing and forgot all about it. Sun on heather, sun on green grass, sun through 100-foot Scotch pines. Golf doesn't get much better.
The first hole is a long par 4 that eases you into the round. You walk to the tee and notice rocky outcrops scattered around the area, which I thought was unusual for an inland forest course. Apparently they're throughout the property. The hole itself is a gentle dogleg with a green that already starts hinting at what's coming. Approach shots at Morfontaine are an exercise in working out the contour of a green you've never putted before. I made bogey. Reasonable opener under tournament pressure.
The 2nd is a par 3. Then another par 4 at the 3rd. By the 4th, which is also a par 3, the routing has settled and you're starting to read the rhythm of Simpson's design. The par 3s at Morfontaine are special. Not one of them is over 200 yards. All of them have these intricate bunker arrangements that look hand-stitched. I made par at the 4th and started feeling like I belonged on the course.
Then the front nine really begins. The stretch from the 7th to the 9th is where Morfontaine announces itself. Three holes that ask everything of you. Strategy off the tee, precision on approach, judgement on putts that will roll in directions you don't expect. I bogeyed the 7th. Made par on 8 with a putt I'm still proud of. Bogeyed 9 by missing the green long. The scoring isn't the point of writing this. The point is that every shot on every hole asked me a real question and made me think about my answer.
The back nine is more of the same quality. The 13th is a short par 3 with a tree controversially blocking part of the line to the green. Some people apparently complain about this tree. I loved it. It made me hit a shot I wouldn't otherwise have hit, which is what good design is supposed to do. The 13th green itself is small and slopey and was the most fun green of my round to putt on.
The greens overall are the highlight. Morfontaine greens are not the wildly contoured statement greens you get on the famous short Vallière course (which I haven't played but which apparently has some of the most dramatic putting surfaces in the world). The Grand Parcours greens are quieter. Subtle slopes, beautifully maintained, with just enough character to make every approach a real decision and every putt a real read. I three-putted twice during the round and both were my fault for not committing to the line.
Trees deserve a mention because they're everywhere and they're managed beautifully. Morfontaine has 100-foot Scotch pines lining many of the holes but they don't crowd the playing corridors the way trees do at some other forest courses. There's space. There's light. There's the occasional gap that lets you glimpse another part of the course. Whoever's been managing the tree work over the decades deserves serious credit. Other clubs should take notes.
Hole 15 has stones in the fairway. Actual stones. They've kept them as a feature. Tom Simpson put them there, or at least kept them there when he routed the hole, and the club has decided to honour the original design rather than clean it up to modern standards. I love this kind of small defiance. It says something about the club's respect for what Simpson built.
The tournament context made the round more memorable than a casual visit would have been. Playing a championship round on a course like this concentrates your attention. You can't drift through admiring the scenery because you've got a card in your pocket and a number you're trying to shoot. But the course is so beautiful and so interesting that you find yourself admiring it anyway, in flashes, between shots. I didn't play particularly well. Didn't play particularly badly either. Walked off the 18th green with a number that wasn't going to win the tournament but that I wasn't ashamed of either.
The clubhouse experience is exactly what you'd expect from a club like this. Warm without being effusive. Members were friendly to the visiting tournament players in a low-key way. Lunch was excellent French country food. Wine list was serious. Service was attentive but not performative. There's an atmosphere to old European private clubs that you don't get anywhere else and Morfontaine has it in full measure.
So is it as good as the rankings say? Yes. Top 50 in the world is about right. Maybe higher. The course has everything you want from championship inland golf — strategic interest, beautiful land, immaculate maintenance, history you can feel under your feet — and it has it all without trying too hard. Simpson was a quiet genius and Morfontaine is the best thing he ever did.
I left thinking about how lucky I'd been to get there. The route to playing Morfontaine is essentially closed to most golfers. You either know a member or you qualify for a tournament. The first option requires connections most people don't have. The second option requires playing well enough at amateur level to get into senior international fields, which isn't trivial either. I got there through golf, which is at least an honest way in. I doubt I'll get the chance again. But I'll always remember the round.
A footnote on golf's accessibility versus exclusivity. Morfontaine is the kind of place that exists at the extreme end of private golf. No website booking, no green fees, no public access. There's a debate in modern golf about whether courses this private contribute to the game or hoard themselves away from it. I lean towards the view that having a few places like this in the world is fine. Most golf is and should be public or semi-public. But the existence of a small number of preserves where the original visions of designers like Simpson can be maintained without commercial pressure is, I think, a net positive for the architectural side of the game. You can disagree with this and I won't argue.
If you ever get the chance, take it. There's no other course quite like Morfontaine.
