Magazine - $2.5 billion plan for Hope Island

By Editor in Golf on 26th Oct 2007 8:00

THE Australian Financial Review newspaper reported last week that Queensland developer Don O'Rorke is “leading a private consortium to acquire part of Hope Island Resort on the Gold Coast, pitting him against rival developer John Fish, who has just announced his $2.5 billion plan for the island. In a private deal separate from his listed development entities, Mr O'Rorke and two Consolidated Properties executives, Mike Dodd and Lachlan Grantley, have agreed to pay $53 million to buy the Hope Island Golf Course, the island's 150-berth resort marina and Boardwalk Tavern, plus two development sites.

The properties were acquired from Mirvac, which bought them from Walker Corporation last year. Gold Coast businessman and Hope Island resident John Thomas plans to run the project and will privatise the 18-hole golf course. “Ultimately we will turn it into a private golf course linked in with a boutique five-star hotel” he said, “existing members of Hope Island Golf Club and existing residents of Hope Island Resort will all be given first choice to buy a membership”. Mr Thomas declined to comment on the cost of golf club memberships but locals said the cost would be at least $45,000, given other golf club memberships on the Gold Coast sell for $80,000. Plans are approved for a 400-room hotel or serviced apartments complex on one site, while the other site can sustain 60 houses.”

When Hope Island opened in 1993, Peter Thomson and his partners Michael Wolveridge and Ross Perrett were told how lucky they were to have been given such a perfect piece of linksland over which to lay the course, nothing could have been farther from the truth.

The design firm of Thomson/Wolveridge & Perrett inherited nothing but a flat, featureless field located some twenty minutes from Queensland's coast. From this unpromising beginning, the architects have created one of the dozen most strategic courses built in the past sixty years.

As the course's name suggests and fittingly from a five time Open winner, the course embodies the best attributes of links golf. The architects had the land beautifully shaped full of ripples, ridges, hollows, and swales and the shaping is so well done that there is no reason to suspect man's hand. In addition, over 120 pot bunkers were liberally scattered across the course.

Read more articles in Golf, by Editor or from October 2007.