The Easton Club in Easton, MD

The Easton Club is located in the highly sensitive ecosystem known as Maryland’s Eastern Shore. Easton was one of the first golf course residential developments to be successfully permitted and built within the Chesapeake Bay Critical Area back in 1995 as the State officially recognized that golf could be an acceptable and beneficial use in the most delicate environments of Maryland. In the ensuing years, more than $120 million dollars of real estate has been sold and today more than 340 families live in this development composed of single-family homes and townhouses.

Situated on 283 acres, The Easton Club boasts an eighteen-hole golf course surrounded by 342 detached and attached single-family home sites, including 152 1/4 acre to ½ acre lots. The golf course was routed through tidal wetlands and a twenty-acre non-tidal basin, creating quite a challenge in developing residential home sites.

Golf course envelopes were maximized for safety yet in areas that golf did not create a conflict, we reduced the envelope in order to increase lot size. The ability to “value engineer” the golf course corridors in a safe and pleasing manner increased single family detached lots by five percent. In odd-shaped corners of the development (created either by environmental constraints or golf) we developed a mixture of detached lot variations which provided eight to ten units per acre.

My former partner in Whole in One Design Group, Robert D. Rauch, and I designed the Easton Club golf course to take full advantage of the character of the Eastern Shore and capture images of the surrounding tidewater area. I took it another step, though, by designing each hole to be representative of the Eastern Shore’s history, flora, fauna, and landmarks. Either literally in feature shaping or through strategic choices, all eighteen holes are distinctively Eastern Shore.

Holes such as Cannonball (#5) and Third Haven (#1) recall Easton’s role in America’s early years. No Corner For The Devil (#15) and Oxford/Bellevue (#13) pay homage to historical landmarks. Tack (#2) asks the golfer to negotiate a left to right hole similar to sailing considerations along the nearby Tred Avon River. Other holes such as Decoy (#8) and Nettle (#17) derive their strategy from the rich heritage of the Chesapeake Bay. The Easton Club is completely built-out and its golf course acts as the primary amenity for two additional residential developments in the area, including Chesapeake by Del Webb in Trappe.