# The Best Golf Courses in East Hampton

Source: https://thecourserankings.com/blog/the-best-golf-courses-in-east-hampton-ny/

[The Course Rankings](/)

Town Rankings / New York


East Hampton golf course. Photo: It's No Game from Leicestershire, UK, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Maidstone does not want you. That is not an insult; it is close to the club's founding principle. The course at Maidstone Golf Club in East Hampton runs through ocean dunes, the club bans phones, the membership walks, and the whole place behaves as if the rest of the Hamptons, the traffic and the scene and the summer money, is a rumour it has heard and declined to believe. Willie Park Jr. laid out golf here on land that most architects would give a decade of their career to touch once.

Two courses make this town's argument, both private, both guarded, and they could not be more different in temperament. One is a century old links on the Atlantic. The other is a modern design built for a newer Hamptons. We score the golf first, then the day, then access, and in East Hampton access is a polite fiction for almost everyone. So the golf has to decide it.

## 1Maidstone Golf Club

Willie Park Jr. on the ocean dunes. Start there. Maidstone's West Course is routinely placed by panelists among the finest courses in America, and for once the consensus undersells the experience, because rankings cannot capture what the place actually is: a walking club on linksland, with the Atlantic in view and in play, where the wind sorts out the visitors from the golfers by the fourth hole.

The golf itself is the argument. Dunes golf is rumpled, blind in places, firm underfoot, all angles and bounce. Maidstone asks for the ground game that American parkland golf forgot, and its short holes by the water are the kind of holes architects sketch on napkins for the rest of their lives. It is not long by modern standards. It does not need to be. The ocean is a hazard that never gets marked with a stake.

The concession is real and we will make it plainly: Maidstone's exclusivity is extreme even by Hamptons standards, and a club that bans phones and pretence alike can tip from charming to theatrical depending on your mood. Nothing about that changes the golf. If anything, the stubbornness protects it. The course has been left alone by fashion, and being left alone is the best thing that ever happened to it.

## 2East Hampton Golf Club

East Hampton Golf Club is the modern entry, a Coore and Crenshaw design that opened in 2000 on inland ground, built in the minimalist style those two architects made the house style of modern golf: lay the holes on the land, keep the shaping quiet, let strategy do the shouting. On any normal town list, a Coore and Crenshaw would walk away with first place. This is not a normal town.

The course is genuinely good, a thoughtful, walkable test through scrub and pines that rewards the golfer who thinks a shot ahead. Its problem is purely local. It is being compared to a Willie Park Jr. links on the Atlantic Ocean, in the same zip code. Inland Hamptons golf, however clever, loses to ocean dunes golf with a hundred years of patina. That is not a flaw in the design. It is geography, and geography is undefeated in East Hampton.

The concession we owe it: for the golfer who actually gets to choose, and very few do, East Hampton might be the more varied everyday test, the course you could play weekly without the wind beating a lesson into you. Maidstone in a gale is an examination. Some days you want a round, not an examination.

Two invitations, neither coming. East Hampton golf is a locked gate with the Atlantic audible on the other side of it, which, if we are honest, is exactly how the town likes everything.

**Reader responses are open.** Please cite a specific hole, a price, or a round you have played.