Michael Clayton

Peninsula Kingswood, North Course

Profile

A former European Tour player turned commentator, Mike Clayton is an outspoken signature golf course designer who has worked on the restoration and redesign of a number of golden-age courses across Australia.

Clayton's start in design came during the late 1990s, when he assembled a team of associates and threw himself seriously into the golf course design business. The first projects his associates worked on were important redesigns of courses like Portsea, The Grange and Peninsula, and restoration work at Victoria GC, which included the return of sandy wastelands to the Sandbelt course.

In 2010 the Michael Clayton Golf Design company changed to Ogilvy Clayton Design, and later to OCCM Design, so named for principals Geoff Ogilvy, Mike Clayton, Michael Cocking and Ashley Mead.

With Cocking as lead designer, OCCM worked on other classic Australian courses like Lake Karrinyup, Commonwealth, Royal Canberra and The Lakes – which involved a substantial redesign of the club’s championship layout.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the playing abilities of Ogilvy, Clayton and champion Amateur Mike Cocking, this company was favoured by the likes of Golf Australia and prestigious clubs of tournament pedigree to add back tees, bunkers and make courses suitable for championship play.

In 2017 and 2018 the South and North Courses at Peninsula Kingswood Country Golf Club in Frankston were reopened, each after an expensive redesign by the OCCM team, again led by Michael Cocking. While the South Course was always long and tough, the North had far more quirk, and was much more playable for average members.

Both courses at PK are undeniably more attractive from an aesthetic perspective and beautifully maintained, but several shots harder for all standard of golfer. Each is now among the most heavily bunkered courses in Melbourne.

Although the OCCM design team was busy with redesign and renovation projects over the last two decades, they were involved in very few new course projects. The only solo design from scratch they completed was Ranfurlie in Melbourne's southeast, which was built during the Michael Clayton Golf Course Design period. Other new course projects were built in collaboration with American Tom Doak, as his associate.

Clayton and his partners did redesign the entire RACV Healesville course, and re-routed part of the Royal Queensland layout following the expansion of a city bridge that cut across their course property. The bunkering at Royal Queensland is a feature, as are the heavily contoured greens and broad, generous fairways that force golfers to choose from multiple routes of attack.

While the addition of Geoff Ogilvy helped OCCM compete for work outside Australia, including appointments to redesign the famed Shady Oaks course in Texas and the Yangste Dunes course in Shanghai, the company directors perhaps felt that having three professional standard golfers in one design business was too many – or that Clayton was too polarizing a figure in Australia.

Either way, in 2019 the company split from Mike Clayton to become OCM. Shortly after, Clayton announced that he had formed a new design partnership with Mike DeVries and Frank Pont, called CDP Golf. Although the three seem unlikely bedfellows in many ways, their experience working on historic courses is convenient for Clayton, who appears to rely on associates for his planning, detail and design direction work.

In early 2021 Mike DeVries (with Clayton) was appointed to design the Seven Mile Beach golf course near Hobart in Australia, which opened at the end of 2025.

For an independent assessment of CDP Golf, Michael Clayton or his former OCCM Design team please contact the Global Golf Group.