The Best Golf Courses on LA's Westside
No stretch of American golf packs more history into fewer square miles than the Westside of Los Angeles. Within a short drive of one another sit Riviera, the North Course at the Los Angeles Country Club, and Bel-Air — three 1920s designs by George C. Thomas Jr., built with the sand-splashed bunker artistry of William P. Bell — plus Golden Age work by Willie Watson, Max Behr, and Norman Macbeth. This is the corridor where the Los Angeles Open grew up, where Ben Hogan earned a nickname, and where the 2023 U.S. Open finally pulled back the curtain on the most private club in the game.
The honest caveat about Westside Los Angeles golf courses is that nearly all of the great ones are strictly private. That exclusivity is part of the story — Hillcrest was founded in 1920 precisely because the city's other clubs excluded Jewish members — but it means this ranking is, for most golfers, a viewing guide as much as a playing guide. The exception matters enormously: Rancho Park, a William P. Bell municipal design that hosted the L.A. Open in its own right, puts anyone with a city tee time right in the middle of the corridor.
Here are the eight courses that define the Westside, ranked.
1. Riviera Country Club
Start with the standard-bearer. George C. Thomas Jr.'s 1926 masterpiece in Santa Monica Canyon — built with William P. Bell — is the annual home of the Genesis Invitational, host of the 1948 U.S. Open and two PGA Championships, and the course Ben Hogan owned so thoroughly it became "Hogan's Alley." The par-71, 7,322-yard routing packs more famous holes per acre than anywhere on the West Coast: the 6th with its bunker in the middle of the green, the drivable 10th, the amphitheater 18th. The 2028 Olympic golf competition is headed here, and it will look like it always belonged.
2. Los Angeles Country Club (North Course)
For decades the North Course hid behind the most guarded membership in golf; then the 2023 U.S. Open, won by Wyndham Clark, showed everyone what architecture obsessives already knew. Thomas's 1928 redesign, restored by Gil Hanse in 2010, may be his finest work — barrancas slashing through the front nine, rugged Bell-style bunkering, and a set of par 3s that runs from a 124-yard pitch to a brute of roughly 290 yards. At par 70 and 7,421 yards, it never stops asking strategic questions, starting with the dare-you drivable 6th.
3. Bel-Air Country Club
Bel-Air is the most theatrical routing in American golf. To link holes stranded in separate ravines, Thomas and constructor Billy Bell drilled tunnels through the ridges, spanned the barrancas with bridges, and installed an elevator to carry players from the 9th green to the 10th tee. That 10th — a par 3 across a deep ravine to a green reached by the famous Swinging Bridge — is the signature walk in Los Angeles golf. A 2018 Tom Doak restoration revived Thomas's original ideas, and at par 70 and 6,482 yards the course is proof that precision beats power.
4. Brentwood Country Club
The oldest course on this list opened in 1916 as the Santa Monica Country Club, on a Willie Watson routing reworked by Max Behr in 1925. Todd Eckenrode's 2013–14 restoration — Golf Inc.'s Private Club Renovation of the Year — removed hundreds of trees and returned the barranca that engages seven holes to its sandy-bottomed, fescue-lined natural state. The result is a firm, strategic par-71 parkland course of 6,948 yards, and the peninsula-green 16th, the Canyon hole, is one of the Westside's great approach shots.
5. Hillcrest Country Club
Founded in 1920 as Los Angeles's first Jewish country club, Hillcrest became the social home of Hollywood's comedians — Jack Benny, George Burns, and the Marx Brothers traded material at its fabled Round Table — and it hosted the 1929 PGA Championship. In 2019 Kyle Phillips comprehensively rebuilt Willie Watson's original course into a modern 7,005-yard, par-71 championship test framed by the towers of Century City. The new par 3s are the stars, led by the 12th, stretchable to 260 yards and played to a massive Biarritz green.
6. Wilshire Country Club
Hancock Park rather than the Westside proper, Wilshire is the eastern bookend of this Golden Age corridor and far too good to leave off. Norman Macbeth's 1919 design threads a snaking barranca through a compact 104 acres — it comes into play on more than half the holes — and its quartet of par 3s is praised by golf architecture writers as an exemplar of variety. Kyle Phillips's 2008 restoration reclaimed the jagged bunker style Macbeth embraced after playing Cypress Point with Alister MacKenzie, and the 18th, finishing beneath the clubhouse in the elbow of the barranca, is widely considered one of the best closing holes in Los Angeles.
7. Rancho Park Golf Course
Here is the answer to all that privacy: one of the busiest municipal courses in America sits in the middle of the corridor, and it is a genuine William P. Bell design (with William Johnson, 1949) with real tournament pedigree. Rancho Park hosted the Los Angeles Open for years — Arnold Palmer won three of them here, and also carded the infamous 12 on the 18th in 1961 that is still commemorated by a plaque at the tee. Par 71, 6,839 yards, tree-lined and small-greened, and bookable through the L.A. City tee-time system: this is the public golfer's way onto the Westside.
8. MountainGate Country Club
The outlier — a 1981 Ted Robinson Sr. design rather than a Golden Age relic — MountainGate stacks three interchangeable par-36 nines on reclaimed landfill in the Sepulveda Pass, above the 405 on the western flank of the Santa Monica Mountains. What it lacks in pedigree it repays in views, with nearly every hole opening onto the canyons and the city below, and it had its own brush with the spotlight as host of the Senior PGA Tour's Johnny Mathis Seniors Classic in 1985 and 1986. Any 18-hole combination plays about 6,765 yards of grabby kikuyu at par 72.
Picking your round on the Westside
If a member invitation lands anywhere on this list, cancel whatever else you had planned — Riviera, the North Course, and Bel-Air are three of the best days available in American golf. If it doesn't, book Rancho Park through the L.A. City tee-time system (go early: the tee sheet is one of the busiest in the country) and warm up on its lighted range. And every winter, the Genesis Invitational turns Riviera into the rare place where anyone can walk the Westside's greatest architecture in person.