Golf Digest's Ron Whitten, the preeminent golf course architecture critic, will review a course each week for GolfDigest.com.

One of the luxuries of my job is that I get to visit a lot of golf courses with their respective architects. So I get to see the design through their eyes, so to speak. I get the background on what it took to create the course. I get to pick the architect's brain about the strategies of each hole, and I get insight about golf course architecture in general. Every time I tour a course with its designer, I learn something new.

I learned four new things when I toured Creekside Golf & Country Club with its designer Rich Mandell last year. Creekside is a daily-fee residential development course about 45 minutes northwest of Atlanta. Mandell is its designer, now a dozen years in the business, who was raised in the suburbs of New York City, graduated from Georgia and is now based in Pinehurst.

First thing I learned:

Developers who try to build golf courses without using a golf architect are asking for trouble.

Creekside was started in the mid-1990s. It was originally called Westchester Golf & Country Club and was designed by a housing developer without a course architect, using a landplan that maximized housing lots and minimized the course to just 5,800 yards maximum. The developer build nine greens and fairways, and then went bankrupt.

A new developer took over and hired Mandell, who was asked to reroute the nine and add nine more. But, since the budget was tight, Rich was asked to retain the nine established greens. Sad to say, these were pancake greens without much character, but Mandell went along with the program and incorporated them as best he could.

Second thing I learned:

I should never judge an entire course by its opening holes. There wasn't much Mandell could do with those primitive opening holes, as surrounding home development was well-established by the time he got involved. The fairway on the par-4 first looks like a highway road cut. The 139-yd. downhill second plays even shorter than it sounds, to a green far too large for the shot. The dogleg-left third is actually a very good hole, but is spoiled a bit in aesthetics by houses too close to the green on the left. The 448-yd. fourth is a 90-degree dogleg right through a forest of hardwoods. It's such a sharp dogleg that it's impossible for average golfers to play in regulation. That gives Creekside three clunkers in the first four holes.

The course picks up considerably from there. The next three are decent holes and from the eighth on, Creekside is one solid hole after another, with a few exceptional ones in the mix. The eighth, 10th and 13th are beautiful par 3s. The 11th and 18th are fine water-guarded par 5s. The 14th may be the toughest par 4 in the state, 468 yards long from the back tees. It has a lake all along the left off the tee, then turns left and plays over the corner of a dam and over another lake to a long narrow diagonal green. Imagine trying to hit the 12th green at Augusta National with a 3-wood. That's the approach shot on the 14th at Creekside.

I'm usually not a big fan of island greens on anything but par 3s (because you can't control the distance and angle of approach shots), but Mandell's island green on the par-5 18th was the sort of big finish that fit Creekside perfectly. At 535 yards from the back tees, just 495 from the whites, and downhill from landing area to green, it's a great gambling finish for all players.

The worst aspect of Creekside is that its front nine is sprawled out to accommodate residential lots. There are a couple hundred yards between the first green and second tee (much of it uphill), another long trek after the fifth to reach the sixth and an even longer distance from the seventh to reach the eighth. We walked it, but Creekside is most definitely a cart course.

The third thing I learned:

As an architect, Rich Mandell has a different take on "minimalism." Most "minimalist" architects profess to adhere to the contours of the land and take only what the land will give them. Mandell is realistic enough to know that most designers rarely get a perfect piece of golfing terrain, so they have to reshape things just to make it playable. (At Creekside, Mandell was able to create much of his back nine from the old abandoned nine-hole Paulding Country Club, which probably wasn't much of a golf course, but certainly had some fine rolling ground and specimen trees.)

Budget constraints also determine how much reshaping an architect can prescribe. At Creekside, Mandell went easy with the humps, bumps and bunkers. He calls it "simplicity in design." There are no enormous mounds along any fairway or behind any green. What mounds he has are gentle. There are no enormous bunkers, either. Fairway and greenside bunkers are small and rather shallow.

Mandell calls this "designing to a human scale." He wants players to feel intimate with the site, not overwhelmed by it. So no mound is over chest high, no bunker deeper than chest deep. Such "low-profile" features gives golfers confidence that they can recover. As a hazard, Rich thinks a five-foot-deep bunker is just as effective as a 15-foot-deep one, and a lot less intimidating. Plus, it's probably a lot less of a maintenance headache.

As for bunkers, there are only a total of 48 on Creekside's 18 holes. That's another minimalist rule for Mandell: Don't overbunker a course. "There are already too many bunkers in the world," he says.

Intimacy and simplicity are two words that Mandell uses quite often when describing his style. I'm not sure about intimacy at Creekside. There are bunches of houses along its fairways. But its architecture certainly reflected simplicity.

The fourth thing I learned:

Every golf architect ought to have his thoughts about that course's design printed in a yardage book. I shouldn't be the only person that gets the inside scoop on why an architect did what he did. Every player ought to have that chance.

The Verdict

The Details

Creekside Golf & Country Club 591 Westchester Club Dr., Hiram, Georgia 30141 For tee times: 770-445-7655 Ext. 14 or 15 Green fees: $44.90 weekdays, $48.00 Friday, $54.90 weekends & Holidays Seniors: $33.75 Monday Through Thursday Walking allowed in late afternoons.