Meadow Club

When Alister MacKenzie and Robert Hunter laid out the Meadow Club in 1927, they were working with an open, treeless landscape in the Bon Tempe meadow on the slopes of Mount Tamalpais — and they designed accordingly. The greens were enormous, ranging from 7,000 to 10,000 square feet, with bold undulations intended to reward creative putting rather than purely straight-line speed. Multiple approach routes were available on most holes, in the spirit of the Old Course at St. Andrews, which MacKenzie openly used as a reference point for this design. It was his first course in North America. He would go on to design Cypress Point (1928), Augusta National (1933), and Sharp Park in San Francisco (1932), but Marin County was where the North American work began.

The Depression and World War II intervened almost immediately. Greens shrank to a fraction of their original size, many hazards lost their purpose, and tree planting over subsequent decades transformed MacKenzie's open links into tight, tree-lined corridors that bore little resemblance to the original intent. The course remained largely untouched in this altered state until 1999, when the club commissioned Michigan architect Mike DeVries — who grew up playing MacKenzie's Crystal Downs Country Club — to oversee a full restoration. DeVries returned the greens to their original dimensions and bunkers to MacKenzie's intended shapes and positions. Tree management became an ongoing program to restore the vistas and playing angles MacKenzie designed while retaining the mature specimens that contribute to the course's beauty. The club also purchased a significant tract of surrounding land and donated it to a land conservancy, permanently protecting the setting from development.

The result is one of the more remarkable private courses in the country. Golf Digest ranks it among the Second 100 Greatest courses in the US for 2025–26 and 27th in California. Reviewers consistently note that it is one of only seven courses in America where no house is visible from any point on the course. The Alister MacKenzie Invitational, a premier collegiate tournament hosted by the University of California, takes place here each fall. The par-71 layout plays to 6,734 yards from the Black tees with a rating of 72.3 and slope of 132. A "MacKenzie" tee set is available on the scorecard. The clubhouse, an Arts and Crafts structure on the hill above the 9th and 18th greens, overlooks the full course. Deer are a constant presence on the fairways.