Fazio's courses of action.

• Author: Pace, Lee
• Position: Tom Fazio - Special Advertising Section: Golf in the Carolinas

The glass door leading from the sidewalk on Main Street in Hendersonville is smudged and dotted with paint. "There's no sign outside," the owner will tell you. "It's across the street from the courthouse - 109 South Main." Next door is the meticulously crafted name of an attorney. On the other side is a print shop, beyond that an antique store.

Tom Fazio is hard at work upstairs on a Wednesday morning in November, doing what he does best: designing, planning, dreaming, visualizing. Only instead of taking 400 acres of marshland or mountains or Sandhills and carving a golf course from them, he's dodging the paint crew and turning 5,1 00 square feet of previously abandoned off ice space into quarters fit for one of the country's top golf-course designers.

"I fell in love with Main Street and decided it would be a great place to have an off ice," Fazio, 45, says. i found this old building. It was terrible. It was a rat hole."

His office on the backside of the second-floor suite looks westward toward Laurel Park Mountain. Yet to be hung are photos of his wife, Susan, and six children: Jenon, Logan, Keegan, Austin, Onae and Gavin. Just outside the window is the black rooftop of the rear half of the building. Beyond are the auburn hues of the hillside.

"I had to have a view of the mountains: Main Street with a view," he says. "We're going to put a deck out there on the rooftop and put up a fence, 6 or 8 feet high, around it." He points toward the mountains from his desk. "So you'll look out the window from here and all you'll see is the mountains."

When it comes to aesthetics, design and how components flow together - whether it's a golf course or an office suite - Tom Fazio knows what he's talking about. And people are flocking to Hendersonville from around the country (the world, even) to enlist his services, which can cost from 10 to 20 percent of a golf course's total construction tab (ranging from $3.5 million to $6.5 million).

In this mountain town where apples and tourists reign, Fazio quietly uses a staff of seven, a private plane, fax machines, overnight delivery and the telephone to build an empire. Fazio has been involved in the design of more than 125 golf courses, including seven in North Carolina and eight in South Carolina.

"It's funny. He was at a highschool football game the other night, just standing along with everyone else," says Jim Sparks, greens superintendent at Champion Hills, a new Fazio course in Hendersonville. "People...