Cypress Point Club

History

The story of Cypress Point begins not with golf, but with a real estate vision. In the 1920s, the Del Monte Properties Company, under the direction of Samuel F.B. Morse, was shaping the Monterey Peninsula into an enclave of exclusivity, and a golf course of exceptional pedigree was central to that ambition. The land itself, running along the rocky edge where the peninsula meets the Pacific, had long been recognized as extraordinary. What it needed was an architect capable of matching the ground’s drama without diminishing it.

That architect was Alister MacKenzie, the Scottish-born doctor turned course designer who had already built a reputation for reading terrain rather than reshaping it. Working in the late 1920s, MacKenzie laid out Cypress Point with the eye of a man who understood that some landscapes required restraint rather than invention. The club opened in 1928, and MacKenzie considered it among his finest achievements — a claim that has held up for nearly a century of scrutiny from architects, players, and historians alike. He was assisted in the routing and construction by Robert Hunter, a fellow disciple of naturalistic design philosophy, and their collaboration produced a course that required remarkably little alteration in the decades that followed.

Cypress Point has remained a private club since its founding, resistant to the kind of commercial pressures that reshaped many of its California contemporaries. It served for years as a fixture in the rotation of the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am (formerly the Bing Crosby National Pro-Am), lending its holes to television audiences before the club withdrew from that arrangement in the early 1990s. Unlike many courses of its era, Cypress Point has seen little in the way of major renovation — a reflection of the club’s long-standing philosophy that MacKenzie’s original work needed no significant correction.