Bogey — Cartoon Golfer Figure, Golf Club Entrance, St Andrews, Scotland

The hard part of a knitted figure is convincing people that it is not soft.

The brief

A club on the Fife coast was rebuilding its driveway and wanted a marker at the entrance: something that said golf before a visitor saw a flag, and that would look deliberate rather than decorative. The reference the club brought us was its own archive — the patterned knitwear members wore in the interwar years. A cartoon golfer at rest on his club, 2.2 m, in club colours.

Knit that never dries

Two samples went out, one smooth and one moulded as a knit, and the club chose the knit at once. Making it work outdoors took three weeks. A moulded stitch pattern is a field of shallow valleys, and valleys hold water and grow a green film on a coastal site. The pattern is therefore not a repeating grid: the ridges curve and sweep, every valley is sloped to a drain line at the edge of the form, and the deepest point in the texture is 4 mm rather than the 12 mm of the first tooling.

Not wool, and people will check

Every visitor who likes the piece touches it, and a proportion pull at it expecting wool. The surface is a textured polyurethane coating over FRP with a fibre content of zero, specified to a hard matte finish because soft-looking surfaces invite the most abuse. The cuffs and collar are the ribbed areas where a hand naturally lands, so they carry the thickest coating.

An entrance is also a sightline

A driveway entrance has a sight splay, and anything inside it is a visibility problem for every car turning in. The figure stands on the verge outside the splay, turned three-quarters to the drive so arriving cars meet its profile rather than its back. It sits on a wide, low stone-edged pad set into the grass, so the mower passes round it. On an exposed links site the base plate and frame are sized for coastal gusts rather than inland ones.

On the verge

Club colours are dark, and dark monochrome at distance reads as a person standing on a verge — the one thing an entrance marker must not look like, so a narrow gold stripe runs through the knit bands and the cuffs are cream. It stands on the bank beside the drive, four metres inside the gate, away from the turn. What the club wrote about it is in the panel above.