The Luling Invitational
A six-figure golf invitational for Luling Sports, staged across a pole barn, a field of wellness tents, and a hotel bar in Austin. Three rooms that had to feel like one weekend, built in three days and struck in one.
The brief
The Luling Invitational is a three-day, six-figure golf invitational for Luling Sports, held at Luling Golf Club — Matt Andresen’s course — with the social programme split across three very different spaces: a pole barn for the seated dinner, a field of wellness tents, and The Boot, a hotel bar in Austin, hosting two cocktail parties.
I was brought in by Carrington Design Co. as principal designer, working alongside an event manager, to handle creative direction, spatial planning, vendor sourcing, and on-site coordination from install through strike.
Design ran roughly two weeks. Install, event, and deinstallation ran four days.
Three rooms, one weekend
The interesting problem was not any single space. It was that a guest moved between a golf club in Luling and a hotel bar in Austin inside the same weekend, and had to experience them as one event rather than three unrelated parties.
They have nothing in common structurally:
- The barn is enormous, hard-surfaced, and acoustically awful. Seated dinner, live musician, full bar.
- The wellness tents — three 20×20 structures — are soft, temporary, and semi-private, hosting massage therapy, IV treatments, and physical therapy, plus a dressing room.
- The Boot is an existing hotel bar in Austin with its own strong personality that I did not get to remove — and it is an hour from the other two venues.
What carries across is not furniture, it is palette, lighting height, and material language. A consistent warmth of light at roughly seated-eye level does more to make three venues feel related than any amount of matching décor — and unlike décor, it survives being loaded into a truck between sites.
The wellness tents were the hardest and least obvious
A dinner space is a known problem: seat people, feed them, let them hear each other.
The wellness tents were not. They had to be comfortable enough for a stranger to lie down in and private enough for a treatment, while sitting in a field, on temporary flooring, with three vendors running different modalities inside them.
That meant the design decisions were mostly about sequence and sightlines — what a guest sees on approach, where they wait, where they change, what is visible from the next tent over. Recliners, flooring, and room dividers were specified around that, not around how the tent photographed empty.
It is the closest thing in my spatial work to designing an onboarding flow. Somebody arrives not knowing what happens next, and every decision is about reducing the number of things they have to ask.
Sourcing is the job
The unglamorous majority of this engagement was vendor work: rentals, furniture, flooring, dividers, décor, food and beverage, bar staff, bussers, a musician, and the wellness practitioners — sourced, scheduled, and then managed live while the event ran.
Design decisions in events are inseparable from logistics in a way they are not in software. A layout that requires a rental item with a three-week lead time is not a layout, it is a wish. Every spatial choice here was made with one eye on what could be delivered, installed, and struck inside the window.
What I would tell you in an interview
Events are the most unforgiving deadline I have worked to. Software slips a sprint; an invitational starts on Tuesday whether the flooring arrived or not. There is no staging environment and no rollback.
What transfers is the sequencing instinct. Designing the wellness tents was a flow problem before it was an aesthetic one — arrival, wait, change, treatment, exit — and getting that order wrong would have produced a queue of confused people in a field, which is a usability failure with a very short feedback loop.