It was a sweet irony that played out on a Portuguese beach nearly eight years ago with a mother and son down on their knees, hands in the sand.
Three decades earlier, they could have been sculpting sand castles and moats on an American beach during a family vacation. This time, golf course architect mom Cynthia Dye McGarey and her adult son, Matt McGarey, were having a serious granular discussion against the backdrop of a pounding sea in Portugal.
They were preparing to build West Cliffs Golf Club in Óbidos, Portugal, and on a site visit, the mother-son duo found themselves deeply engrossed in their vision of the course that would open in 2017.
“We would go to the beach and shape with our hands in the sand what we thought we wanted to build,” said Matt, 42, a senior design associate at his family’s Dye Designs Group business in Denver, Colorado. “Then we would take a picture of it and try to re-create it as a golf course.”
You could say creating golf courses runs deep in the Dye family DNA. Cynthia’s father, Roy Anderson Dye, designed courses, as did her uncle, the late Pete Dye, a World Golf Hall of Fame member. Pete and his late wife, Alice, also a course designer, had two sons, Perry and P.B., who followed the family lineage. Cynthia’s husband, O’Brien McGarey, was in the business, along with her late brother, Matthew Dye, as well as sons Matt, Charlie and Sam McGarey and a host of other Dye family members.
And while the Dyes had their respective design firms – amassing more than 350 golf courses in 28 countries on five continents among them since 1922 – the truth is, they have regularly helped one another on work sites for decades. The younger Dye kids always had summer jobs on new golf course projects somewhere in the world, which gave them hands-on experience, along with a vested interest to stay in the family business.
“They say it’s in our blood,” Matt said with a chuckle. “Through Pete, Perry, P.B. and my mom, there was that environment of passion for building golf courses. And then you get into it, and it just clicks that this is what you want to do.”
Cynthia, 68, wasn’t always sure she wanted to follow the Dye destination in course design and construction. One of eight children, she saw “the highs and lows of the business” and how its demands could stress family life.
With a focus on horticulture, she launched her career in the 1980s designing landscapes for commercial and residential buildings in Phoenix, Arizona. She even designed some high-end custom homes in Desert Highlands, a private golf club community in nearby Scottsdale.
“Plants and horticulture are my thing, and I kind of got into this through the back door as the landscaper of various golf course projects my family had going on,” she said.
While she was living in Phoenix, her uncle Pete needed help with plants at PGA West, so she went to work with him in California. Cousin Perry needed help with plants on courses he was building in Japan, so Cynthia traveled to Asia to help him and ended up working with Perry on numerous other courses.
Over 10 years, Perry had built 25 courses in Japan, and his design business had grown to 175 employees. Cynthia’s husband, O’Brien, was recruited to run the Denver office, so the McGareys packed up their five kids and headed to Colorado as Cynthia continued to travel for the various Dye projects.
“I’ve worked with family all of my life, and I was so happy to have Matt working with me.” — Cynthia Dye McGarey
By the early 2000s, Perry was scaling back his international work and travel. Cynthia was working for Pete at the Promontory Club in Park City, Utah, building the Pete Dye Canyon Course, when she received a request to design a golf course called White Horse Golf Club in Kingston, Washington – later named to Golf Digest’s list of Best New Courses in 2007.
“That was the first golf course I designed, and from there, it was onward,” said Cynthia, who had launched her own firm, Dye Designs Group, in 2001.
Meanwhile, her son Matt was running heavy equipment on work sites with Pete and Perry. He traveled to California and learned about building greens at Ocean Trails, built by Pete, in Rancho Palos Verdes. Studying business administration at Bond University in Queensland, Australia, Matt ended up leaving school early to learn about golf course drainage with Pete and Perry at a course they were building in Spain.
By 2007, at age 25, he went to work with his mother for the first time on a course renovation at Nassau Country Club in Glen Cove, New York. Matt was bouncing back and forth between golf course construction with Perry at nearby Pound Ridge Golf Club and the course renovation with his mom on Long Island, learning new things at each project.
“I was just a rookie construction worker following my mom’s way in how she explains things onsite versus working in the office with plans, drawings and hole routings,” Matt said. “I watched how that knowledge in her head transferred to the guys she works with to put into the ground a design creating golf holes.”
Cynthia welcomed Matt into her group and marveled at the skills he had honed working with other family members.
“I’ve worked with family all of my life, and I was so happy to have Matt working with me,” she said. “He knows the machines much better than I do and is so talented.”
The two found they complemented each other immediately as combined “left-brain and right-brain thinkers.” Matt also learned his mother’s work ethic was “nonstop.”
“My mom spends more time onsite than any architect I’ve ever been involved with,” he said. “She’s very dedicated to watching the process of building a course, and it actually helps the efficiency of the construction process.”
By working with his mom, he also discovered she had a “sixth sense” when it comes to mapping out the holes that compose a golf course.
“When people talk about her work, they talk about her ability to route golf holes using the land, as well as her environmental touches,” Matt said.
And when asked about her design philosophy, Cynthia lists playability and sustainability among her top priorities.
“Our golf courses are more about risk and reward, but we always offer an avenue around that option,” she said. “My uncle Pete used to ask, ‘And how are you going to get there?’ – making me think about how I would play a hole. I want to make golf holes memorable, different from each other and yet have harmony between each individual hole on the course.”
Cynthia’s aunt, Alice Dye, was a huge advocate of forward tees and courses with multiple tee-box options, a concept Cynthia has taken to heart with her own course designs. And she’s more determined to offer shot variety than creating lengthy courses only the most skilled can play.
In addition, Cynthia is building courses with an eye on sustainability, using native and more climate-resilient plants while minimizing the need to irrigate beyond turf areas. She recently was recognized as a 2024 “Sustainable Golf Champion” by the Geo Foundation for Sustainable Golf, an international nonprofit founded 16 years ago to support and reward sustainability action in golf.
“I lived in Phoenix for 22 years and built three golf courses in Las Vegas, so I’m very aware of water constraints and thinking about how much turf is needed to make a course playable,” she said. “Some think you need 250 acres to build a golf course, but maximum, you need 80 acres of turf to play golf.”
Certainly, the Dye name opened some doors for her, but Cynthia is still only one of a few female golf course architects in the industry, a factor which she downplays.
“I think I have gained a lot of respect in the fact that my work has been acknowledged,” said Cynthia, who has 35 years of experience working as an architect in 27 countries worldwide.
In addition to White Horse and West Cliffs, her design portfolio includes Dreamland Golf Club in Azerbaijan, Foison Golf Club and Beijing Daxing Capital in China, Ferrum Club in South Korea, Hacienda Country Club in Panama and Sheraton New Caledonia Deva Resort in New Caledonia.
“My mom and I are not saving lives or building skyscrapers. And we always say, ‘We have to have fun while building golf courses or else golfers are not going to have fun playing it.’” — Matt McGarey
Her renovations include The Club at Inverness and Copper Creek Golf Club in Colorado, and Ocean Point Golf Links at Fripp Island Resort, South Carolina.
“I do the plans, I do all of my plants, and all of the grading work is done by me,” she said. “People I work with know that I understand exactly what’s on that paper and I know exactly what’s going on in the ground. I think people respect what I do, and not just because of my name.”
Matt has the best vantage point to watch his mom work. And while he had plenty of opportunities to work for other architects, he concedes there was only one place he wanted to be.
“We are all a family, but working with my mom was always the goal,” said Matt, who now has 25 years of experience designing and building golf courses. “I’m the fourth generation in this business, and the goal was always to keep extending it in our family.”
And even if a project takes them away from home for several months, the mother-son duo finds ways to spend time together wherever they are – enjoying the local culture and cuisine abroad, as well as time on the local beaches that double as both a drawing board, as well as a relaxation site.
“My mom and I are not saving lives or building skyscrapers,” Matt said. “And we always say, ‘We have to have fun while building golf courses or else golfers are not going to have fun playing it.’ I guess you could say we really enjoy building and playing in the dirt together.”