# The Best Golf Courses in Fairfield

Source: https://thecourserankings.com/blog/the-best-golf-courses-in-fairfield-ct/

[The Course Rankings](/)

Town Rankings / Connecticut


A golfer walking a fairway. Photo: PattayaPatrol, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Fairfield sits on Long Island Sound in the commuter belt, an hour from Manhattan, and its golf has the pedigree that money and old New York golf culture produce when they settle in one town. Two private clubs here carry names that make architecture people sit up: a Tillinghast, and a Raynor on the Sound itself. Gene Sarazen learning the game as an assistant pro at one of them. Then, because Fairfield is still a town and not a gated fantasy, a solid public course rounds out the list. The order at the top is the argument. Seaside Raynor against inland Tillinghast is a fair fight, and reasonable panels could flip it.

## 1Country Club of Fairfield

The Country Club of Fairfield wins on the combination nothing else in town can match: Seth Raynor's design language laid directly on Long Island Sound. Raynor courses are arguments in geometry, template holes and bold contours, and here the argument gets salt air and open water as its closing statement. Wind off the Sound changes the test by the hour, which is the oldest and best defense a course can have. Templates that would feel stern inland become something better seaside, because no two rounds ask the same questions.

The concession is that Raynor's style is a taste not everyone acquires. Golfers raised on soft, receptive parkland golf can find the contours abrupt, even severe. And access is as restricted as the setting suggests; estimates for Fairfield County clubs of this standing run well into six figures, and that is an estimate, but the gate is not. None of it moves the ranking. A Raynor on the water, in a state full of fine inland golf, is the rarest thing on this list, so it goes first.

## 2Brooklawn Country Club

Brooklawn is the Tillinghast, and its human story is the best in Fairfield golf: Gene Sarazen worked here as an assistant pro before he became Sarazen, one of the game's defining champions learning his trade on these fairways. Tillinghast's work has the usual Tillinghast virtues, strategic bunkering, greens that reward the correct side and tax the wrong one, a routing that never wastes a hole. Brooklawn has also carried competitive golf at a serious level for a century's worth of good players, and it wears that history lightly, as a working club rather than a museum.

Why second, then? Setting as tiebreak, stated openly. Brooklawn's golf, hole for hole, can stand next to the Country Club of Fairfield's without flinching. It cannot stand next to the Sound. On architecture alone this might be a coin flip; with the water counted as part of the day, the coin lands seaside. Brooklawn's members, who can play a genuine Tillinghast any day they like, are unlikely to feel robbed.

## 3H. Smith Richardson Golf Course

Smith Richardson is Fairfield's public answer, the town course where the non member game lives, and it is better than the token muni slot on a rich town's list usually is. The golf is straightforward and kept with pride, the tee sheet democratic in the way that makes town golf valuable: juniors, league players, the dawn patrol, all sharing one course because the town decided to run one properly.

Third is the correct and unsurprising finish, given what sits above it. Two of New England's most pedigreed private clubs share a zip code with this place, and almost no public course in America would outrank them. Smith Richardson's job is different, and it does it well. On a summer evening, with the light going long over a public fairway in one of the wealthiest counties in America, it makes the healthiest point on this list: Fairfield's golf, at its best, is not only behind gates.

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