Town Guides / New Jersey
The Bernardsville Golf Guide
You can drive through Bernardsville and miss one of the fifty best golf courses in America. That is not an insult to your eyesight. Somerset Hills Country Club hides in Somerset Hills horse country with almost no signage, on estate land in a town that has never felt the need to advertise itself. The visitor's problem in Bernardsville is not finding golf. It is getting invited to any of it. This is a private club town, one of the most private in New Jersey, and the guide has to start there.
The anchor is Somerset Hills, an A.W. Tillinghast design built from 1916 to 1918, before Winged Foot and before Baltusrol made Tillinghast a household name among golfers. The club itself was founded in 1899 and moved to Bernardsville estate land bought in 1916 for a full 18 holes. Golf Digest ranks it No. 3 in New Jersey, and GOLF Magazine put it No. 51 in the world in its 2025 to 26 list. Those rankings, for a course many New Jersey golfers have never seen, tell you how strongly the people who do get inside rate it.
Where the golf concentrates
Somerset Hills is two courses in one walk. The front nine crosses open former racetrack meadow, broad and exposed, and the back nine enters woods with natural water features, a complete change of mood at the turn. Its most cited hole is the Redan par 3 second, a template hole with a steep back-left slope that does exactly what a Redan is supposed to do: reward the shaped shot that uses the ground and punish the one flown straight at the flag. Tillinghast was about forty when he built it, and the course carries a young architect's confidence, the templates worn openly rather than disguised.
A long restoration, running over about twenty-five years, has returned Tillinghast features that time and mowing patterns had softened. The club also keeps an old member tradition that visitors find startling: no tee times, noted by GOLF Magazine. You show up, you play. In an era of booking windows and lottery systems, a top fifty course in the world operating without a tee sheet is a statement about membership size and culture that no amount of money can retrofit onto a crowded club.
The supporting cast is strong and equally private. Morris County Golf Club, in the Morristown area, is a Seth Raynor design where the club recently discovered that C.B. Macdonald also worked on the design, per Golf Digest in 2025, a finding that raised its architectural stock considerably. Raynor's template holes are its draw, and the club carries its own history as one of the few clubs founded by women. Spring Brook Country Club completes the anchor list. Three private clubs, three sets of gates. The full local order is in our Bernardsville town ranking.
The order to play them, and the access reality
If invitations somehow align, play Somerset Hills first, while your head is clear, because it is the best course in town by a distance and one of the best in America. Play Morris County second, for the Raynor and Macdonald templates and the pleasure of comparing two Golden Age schools in one trip. Spring Brook third, as the local member's course that rounds out the Somerset Hills scene.
Now the reality, stated plainly. All three are private. There is no public tee time in this guide, no resort stay that unlocks a round, and costs at this level of New Jersey private golf are unpublished and firmly in the high estimate tier. The USGA headquarters sits a few miles away in Far Hills, which tells you what kind of golf neighborhood this is: the game's governing body chose to live here, among the estates and the hunt country, next to courses almost nobody gets to play. Visitors without a member connection should treat Bernardsville as a reading trip and a driving trip, and put their playable golf elsewhere in the state, guided by our New Jersey state ranking.
The one mistake visitors make
The mistake is assuming that a famous ranking means a findable course. Golfers drive out expecting signage, a pro shop they can walk into, maybe a guest day to ask about. Somerset Hills rewards none of that. It has spent a century being deliberately quiet, in horse country, behind the culture of a club founded in 1899 that has never needed the public's attention. Respect the quiet. Make the call to your one connected friend months ahead, not from the driveway.
Bernardsville, in the end, is a lesson in American golf geography. Some of the best ground in the game sits in small towns in the Somerset Hills, maintained to the highest standard, restored over decades, and seen each year by fewer people than play a mid-tier Florida resort course in a week. If you ever stand on that Redan second tee with the meadow behind you, you will understand why the members never bothered with a sign.