Putting greens

A putting green install isn’t a turf install with cups. The roll speed has to be in the ten-to-twelve stimp range — what you’d see on a championship Sunday — and that comes from infill density, pile height, and base contour, not from the turf catalog.

We build greens on a sand-stabilized base, not crushed concrete. The base is shaped to the homeowner’s contour spec — usually two breaks and a single ridge if you want the green to read — then capped with a sand layer that sets the speed. The turf is a short-pile nylon, sand-filled to within ⅛ inch of the surface, brushed against the grain to hold the line.

Most backyard greens we install are 600 to 2,000 square feet, two to six cups, with chipping aprons in a longer-pile fringe yarn. The largest residential green we’ve built was 4,800 square feet with a full bunker simulation on a Royal Palm Yacht estate. The green held a 10.5 stimp the day we left and was still reading the same a year later.