The Shelter Harbor Golf Club is one of southern New England’s landmark 27 hole championship golf courses and private clubs. HMWhite established the landscape design and setting for the club’s entrance, its one mile long entry drive and the clubhouse’s immediate campus that incorporates more than 15 acres of its 410 acre upland oak and maple woodland. Collaborating with a multi-disciplinary project team to preserve and enhance the club's distinctive qualities and characteristics, the design approach was developed to minimize site disturbance and integrate storm water management techniques within a series of native landscape systems. Working with the components of a glacial till geomorphology, native grassland meadows and extensions of the surrounding woodland, a timeless landscape character was established and helped mitigate the extent of the club’s newness.

As former agricultural grazing land, the site’s fieldstone walls were extended and used in the landscape’s architectural language, to further strengthen the seamless integration of “new” and “old.” The consolidation of landscape strategies and site engineering goals, and the use of sustainable, native plant communities proved successful in meeting strict project budget goals.