Top 100 Clubhouse - Golf Podcast · Top 100 Golf Courses

Episode 78: Christian Lundin Talks Through His Latest Design Projects

June 23, 2025·1 hr 18 min·2 clips

Great course design isn't about fairways—it's about winning the mental game in 2.5 seconds.

James Henderson opens by arguing that amateur golf is the real foundation of the game. He frames golf as something people mostly experience by walking, looking, and talking, with the actual hitting taking up only a small part of the round. Christian Lundin joins as a golf course architect. Henderson and Lundin have met before in Trump Aberdeen and settle into a long conversation about golf course architecture. Lundin traces his own start back to his parents' garden. He and his older brother hit wedges across the lawn, using a tree as the flag, which gives the beginning of his story a playful feel rather than a grand one. The conversation turns to Regolf. Lundin explains the name as remodel, revitalize, restore, and says the company was branded to put the golfer, the course, and the client first. He says the point is not to make the architects the story. The pair then talk about how golfer expectations have changed. Lundin credits media, especially social media, with making great golf courses more visible and making details like mowing lines and shaping part of the conversation. He notes that those images have changed what golfers ask for. Sweden comes up as an example. Lundin says Swedish golfers were long trained to travel to places like Spain for weather and cheap rosé, but that more Scandinavians now seek out great golf courses. The UK is presented as a different case. He suggests many British golfers already travel widely, while US travelers coming over to Europe are often very well educated about golf. The dialogue keeps its relaxed, digressive rhythm. It does not rush toward a polished thesis, because the pleasure is in moving from one thought to the next and letting the subject open up naturally. Henderson and Lundin keep returning to the idea that golf is meant to be fun. It is meant to be a pastime for almost everyone who plays it. It is meant to be social. The closing stretch lands on the simple fact that people can stand around for four hours, chat for four hours, and still treat the round as the point of the day. Henderson closes by wishing Lundin well with Crownwood and its opening. Lundin thanks him, and the interview ends with the sense that the conversation could easily continue somewhere else, on another course, with another round of golf chat.

As heard by us

A conversational look at golf architecture, Regolf, and how social media has raised expectations for courses.

Top 100 Clubhouse spends this hour with Christian Lundin on golf course architecture, moving from his back-garden start to Regolf, the name he built around remodel, revitalize, and restore.

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Why you'd press play

If you care about golf architecture, this is a proper long walk through how courses get made.

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