When Sean Howard and Carolyn Michaud moved from Seattle to Walnut Creek three years ago, they acquired a new life and something even better.
“I had a garage for the first time,” recalls Howard. “I went to Home Depot and bought a whole bunch of power tools. I built a workbench, and I was just building stuff. I’m like, ‘Yeah, here we go – power tools!’”
Howard’s first major project was a mini-golf hole. It was a two-level construction where you putt a golf ball up to the top, and the closer you got to the hole, the more points you were awarded. “I wanted to build a hole to see if I could do it,” he says. “So I built a hole. Turned out pretty good.”
Howard showed his wife the hole. “I said, ‘Hey, I built this thing.’ She’s like, ‘Oh, that’s awesome! What do you want to do with it?””
He had an inkling. Before coming to Walnut Creek, he spent many years in Seattle working as a restaurant manager at Ruth’s Chris Steak House and the seafood joint, Ivar’s. He was growing tired of the grind and, among all his power tools, was feeling a new hope.
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“I just wanted to get out of the industry or be in something in a smaller capacity where I was the owner,” he says. “I thought if I built these holes, my wife and I could open a little tavern with beer and wine and an outdoor area and then have the holes. That was the pipe dream, I guess.”
One hole became four, then eleven. “Silly me for thinking we would park our car in the garage,” says Michaud. “And since the garage wasn’t quite big enough for Sean’s new ‘hobby,’ it took over our living room, as well. Then it took over the yard.”
Today, you can see the fruition of Howard’s dream at Putters Putt Putt, a full-blown minigolf course operating in a parking lot in downtown Walnut Creek. On a recent afternoon, families and groups of teens ambled among the course’s 22 holes, while speakers played local radio over the sound of an electric saw whirring as Howard worked on a new hole.
Putters is charmingly rustic. Barriers made from regular bricks are bolted into green carpet. There are pendulums cut from 4-by-4s that you have to start in motion yourself. On a few holes, the golf ball wanders around on its own accord, as if steered by a poltergeist, possibly due to some carpentry issues or the slant of the parking lot.
One hole that regularly got a chuckle from players before it disappeared – Howard is always swapping out old holes for new ones – measured 3 feet by 3 feet, smaller than the platform you stand on to putt into it. “We named it ‘Big Ern,’ which is the nickname of my buddy in Seattle who’s a little person. We call him ‘Big Ern,’ everybody does. I sent him a picture of the scorecard (with his name on it), and he got a pretty good kick out of that.”
“Big Ern” had the distinction of being one of the holes with a male-sounding appellation. “Most of them are named after a female member of our family,” says Howard. “There’s ‘The Librarian’ – my wife’s mom is a librarian. ‘Jo Jo’ is my auntie Jo, ‘Heather Lake’ is my sister-in-law, ‘Eleanor’ is my niece. Carolyn has a pretty big family.”
The quirkiness of the course seems to have only enhanced its attraction. “It is not the most elaborate, gimmicky golf course,” writes one Yelp reviewer. “It is simple. And plain. Like your father put it together in a weekend because he didn’t want to spend the money on an actual course. Good. Simple. Course.”
“Brought my niece and nephew here in the afternoon on a workday, and it was by far the best thing we could have done,” opines another. “It’s not traditional mini golf, it’s something different. It’s kinda like a weird, ambitious, independent movie that’s way better than the studio movies, because it’s creative, and it has heart.”
The Bay Area has experienced a recent boom in fancy mini golf. At Urban Putt, you can swing a stick while drinking beer and twisting knobs on a hole that looks like a deep-sea submarine. Stagecoach Greens is both a minigolf course and historical extravaganza, with holes telling the story of the Gold Rush. The newly opened Potion Putt offers players a sensory dive into a world of wizardry that some might say is Harry Potteresque (though for legal reasons, it must not be said).
Putters Putt Putt isn’t any of that. “We are not trying to compete with them by any means,” says Michaud. “They put some serious money into their operations,” adds Howard.
“Their holes are so well designed and beautiful,” Michaud says. “And we love that, but we also love our little, homemade golf course. I don’t want to say we weren’t well planned but, uh – Sean’s telling me to shut up – we definitely didn’t spend years putting it on paper drafting it out.”
That hasn’t impeded Putters’ success. In fact, the duo is targeting Alameda, Martinez or Napa for a second location. Michaud quit her restaurant job in anticipation of running the new course, and Howard has repopulated their home with holes to stock it with. “Our neighbors hate us,” he jokes.
In their spare time, the couple plans out new holes. “We have a whiteboard in the garage, and I’ll have an idea. But 90 percent of the time I always ask Carolyn, ‘What do you think of this?’” says Howard. “She’s always got her opinion: ‘No, let’s try it this way.’ She sometimes thinks I’m a better carpenter than I am. I’m like, ‘I don’t know how to do that!’”
One imperative Carloyn has is that holes must be relatively easy because “I’m a quitter, for sure.” So while their current course has its tricky parts, it’s theoretically possible to get a hole-in-one on every swing. “We are waiting someday for someone to come in” and do that, she says. “Kids tend to do a better job because they don’t overthink it. One kid got seven hole-in-ones on nine holes. He was on fire.”
Is there a prize if you one-hole the entire thing?
“They get to take their favorite hole home with them,” she says. “That’s fine – we’ll do that.”
Details: Putters Putt Putt ($10) is open from 2 to 7:30 p.m. Wednesday-Friday, and 12:30 to 7:30 p.m. on weekends at 1275 S. California Blvd. in Walnut Creek; puttersputtputt.com.