The April 28 approval by the city’s professional planning department clears the way for Morefar Back O’ Beyond golf club to upgrade its 334 acres on Danbury’s west side with the construction of a driving range, a practice green, a putting green, a 3,640-square-foot golf cart barn, and a 1,400-square-foot range hut.
Morefar also plans “minor reshaping, reseeding and resodding of the existing golf course holes 12-16,” in Danbury, according to blueprints.
Improvements to the 345 acres that Morefar owns next door to Danbury in Southeast, N.Y., are in the advanced stages of review. Those plans call for a new clubhouse, four new 2-bedroom units, a meeting venue, a general manager’s house, an activity barn with maker space, a fitness and wellness center, and “redevelopment of the existing eighteen-hole golf course, including the renovation of the existing tee boxes, fairways, bunkers, greens.”
All told, it’s the largest undertaking the 60-year-old club has taken at one time to make its exclusive grounds “more user friendly.”
“It’s stuck in the 1960s and 1970s,” said Robert Dorsch, a Danbury High School graduate and the former superintendent at Richter Park public golf course in Danbury, who now works for Morefar. “There has been very little updating.”
Dorsch’s comments came during a public hearing in February where members of Danbury’s wetlands commission voiced concerns about the upgrade’s impact on ecologically sensitive land.
Morefar received permission from the wetlands commission to fill in one-tenth of an acre of environmentally sensitive wetlands to build the driving range.
To compensate for the lost wetlands, Morefar agreed to build one-quarter acre of plantings that replicate the natural water filtering and flood control functions of wetlands. Morefar also agreed to clear an invasive species of barberry from the section of the wetlands closest to the proposed driving range.
Morefar is identified on an NBC Sports website as one of “12 Insanely Private Golf Courses You Will Never Get to Play.” Golfers can still admire Morefar from Danbury’s public course Richter Park to the east, the website notes, which was designed by the same architect, Edward Ryder.
“This mysterious club is actually visible from another course: the municipal Richter Park in Danbury,” reads the feature in GolfPass. “But that’s the closest you are likely to get to this layout.”