Brian Johnson, 48, joined Brian Silva as a partner in 2025, following an eventful professional journey that educated the Wisconsin native in ways most course architects only read about.

In 2001, Silva and his partners at Cornish, Silva & Mungeam hired Johnson and his Landscape Architecture degree fresh out Iowa State University. Four years later, the young associate was hired away by Houston-based Jacobsen Hardy, where he worked on original design projects like Brasada Ranch near Bend, Oregon, the Wanderers Club in Wellington, Florida, and Sand Hill Farm GC in Waller, Texas.

In 2009, when the bottom fell out of the course design and development business, Johnson helped to construct Sand Hill Farm. Once it opened, he formed a management company dedicated to the maintenance, operation and eventual expansion of the property.

“Sand Hill Farm has been a great experience for me, and my company will continue to head up operations there,” explains Johnson who, over the last decade, has served as the facility’s GM, Golf Professional and Class A Golf Course Superintendent. “There’s a special understanding that develops when a course architect is also the guy taking care of the finished product. Add another layer of learning and nuance when it comes to working a resulting maintenance bottom line into an overall facility-operations budget.

“It’s been a full-spectrum, hands-on education at Sand Hill Farm. I mean, Brian Silva was a USGA agronomist. Our clients derive huge value from that experience. I’ve been looking after modern ultradwarf bermudas every day for the last 15 years. Together, we believe our design client can only benefit from that brand big-picture perspective.”

In 2010, Johnson took on yet another hat during his tenure at Sand Hill Farm (see image above): He started handling all the back-office drawing and drafting for Brian Silva, who’d gone solo. Johnson provided all the AutoCad plan production, hole strategies, grading and drainage development, turf specifications and detailed hole renderings that enable the master plan process.

“Brian has been a such a generous mentor to me through the years,” says Johnson. “He and his partners gave me my first job in the design business, but the last 15 years have been different. It’s been a privilege and education to see how he has planned and executed the renovation work at so vintage tracks — places like Raynor’s Country Club of Charleston and Metairie in Louisiana; the Ross courses at Interlachen and Brookside, in Canton, Ohio; not mention the infusion of classic design principles at original designs like The Renaissance Club and Great Horse in Massachusetts. To be out front a bit more, as a lead designer and partner? It’s a dream come true.”

In reality, Silva saw the seeds of this partnership well before 2010: “Brian Johnson’s skills made many of my recent projects what they came to be — in a back-office respect, but also strategically,” Silva says. “To cite just one example: Back when The Renaissance Club was being planned, when he was still working for CSM, I shared my routing and hole strategies with my colleagues, partners and associates. That’s just something we did; always good to get another set of eyes… Well, that was 20 years ago. Brian was just a kid but a half-dozen of those holes today are his work. He’s got a real gift for hole strategies. And, of course, he’s far more resourceful and experienced today. He’s more than ready.

“More than 40 years ago, Geoffrey Cornish — who got his start as an agronomist working for Stanley Thompson in the 1930s — extended to me the same sort of partnership opportunity. I’ve worked alongside Brian Johnson for 25 years now. He’s as good a strategist as there is working today. I might not have recommended this move 10 or 15 years ago. There wasn’t enough work out there. Today, there is.”