Town Rankings / Illinois
The Best Golf Courses in Lake Forest
Lake Forest was built as summer Chicago, the place the city's richest families went when the city got hot, and its golf still carries that DNA: old money, old clubs, ravines running down to Lake Michigan, and gates that have been closed for a century. Four courses anchor this ranking and all four are private, which makes Lake Forest the purest architecture argument on our Illinois lists. Access cannot scramble the order, because access is zero across the board. This one is golf only.
And what golf. A Seth Raynor from 1919, a club that hosted a U.S. Open in 1906, a Tom Fazio course that hosted the BMW Championship, and a fourth club that would headline most suburbs in America. We score the golf first, then the day, then setting, and in Lake Forest the setting keeps voting, because the ravines and the lake bluffs are the rare Midwestern ground that gives architects something real to work with.
1Shoreacres
Shoreacres is Seth Raynor's ravine masterpiece from 1919, and it is the best course in Lake Forest because it might be the best piece of golf architecture in Illinois, full stop. Raynor routed the course around and across the ravines that cut the property on their way to the lake, so the land itself supplies the strategy and the fear: carries over gullies, greens perched near edges, holes that look simple until you stand over the shot the ravine has chosen for you. Raynor's template holes are famous because they work, and at Shoreacres the templates meet terrain that flatters none of them into routine.
The concession is that Shoreacres is a connoisseur's course in an era of conditioning arms races. It has never tried to be a tournament factory, it does not host the events its neighbors collect, and golfers who equate greatness with length and difficulty will find it short and strange. That is the tell that they are measuring the wrong thing. Shoreacres has survived a century of architectural fashion without chasing any of it, and the panelists who rank it among the best courses in America are not being nostalgic. They are being accurate.
2Onwentsia Club
Onwentsia hosted the 1906 U.S. Open, back when Lake Forest was summer Chicago in the literal sense and the championship came to the resort town of the Midwestern rich. A U.S. Open that early is a founding document, not just a resume line: the club was at the center of American golf when American golf was being invented, and it has stayed at the center of Lake Forest life ever since, golf, tennis, and the whole social architecture of the North Shore in one old, understated place.
Second on the strength of the golf as it plays now, and the concession owes Onwentsia its due: if this ranking weighted what a club means to its town, Onwentsia finishes first and Shoreacres is the visitor's answer. The pure architecture argument runs the other way. Raynor's ravines are a specific, repeatable genius that Onwentsia's more classical charms do not quite match hole for hole. But a club that hosted a U.S. Open 120 years ago and remains the living room of Lake Forest is not losing this ranking. It is lending the top spot to a masterpiece.
3Conway Farms Golf Club
Conway Farms is the Tom Fazio course that hosted the BMW Championship, which means Lake Forest has a modern tournament venue to set against its two golden age clubs, and the contrast is the most instructive thing on this list. Fazio built a big, polished, television ready test on open ground, a course designed to examine tour players and photograph well doing it, and when the BMW came, the best players in the world came to a suburb that also contains a Raynor from 1919. Conway is golf as the modern game presents itself: scale, conditioning, infrastructure.
Third because the modern virtues age faster. The BMW has moved on, as modern tournaments do, while Shoreacres and Onwentsia remain what they were. The concession is real, though: for a golfer who wants to test himself against the same examination the tour faced, Conway is the only ticket in Lake Forest, and its conditioning on a good week is the best in town. It loses to history and to genius, which in this town is what third place means.
4Knollwood Club
Knollwood finishes fourth on a list where fourth would win most towns in the Midwest outright. It is a classic North Shore members' club, old ground, a loyal membership, a course that has served Lake Forest families for generations without needing a national argument to justify itself. On a state ranking Knollwood is a respected name. In its own zip code it is surrounded by a Raynor masterpiece, a 1906 U.S. Open site, and a former BMW Championship host, and there is no shame in being the fourth best course in that company.
The shortest write up for the simplest verdict: Knollwood is the club its members would choose, and rankings are not memberships. The golf is a step below the three arguments above it, and everybody in Lake Forest, including Knollwood's own members after the second drink, knows the order and the reasons.
Four private clubs, two of them among the oldest arguments in American golf, one Raynor threaded through the ravines above the lake. Lake Forest was summer Chicago. Its golf never went home.