GO SPORTS!

From ballparks to fairways to sports bars, athletic environments are some of the most story-rich spaces we work in. And some of our favorites.

There are hotels near ballparks, and then there's the Omni San Diego at the Ballpark. It sits steps from Petco Park, its guests are often there because of the Padres, and on game day the energy of the ballpark moves through the building. The art had to reflect that without becoming a souvenir shop. Behind the reception desk, a wall of vintage wood bats - objects with real history, real wear - establishes the identity immediately. Large-scale photographs of players in motion carry it through the property. The collection doesn't decorate the hotel's relationship to baseball. Done right, it’s not just a gesture toward baseball,  It feels like the real thing.

AND Then there's golf. Our staff now knows about every term and tournament…

Golf presents a different challenge. The sport is inseparable from its terrain, its history, and in the case of the Omni PGA Frisco, its geography. Texas produced Ben Hogan, Byron Nelson, Lee Trevino. That lineage deserved more than framed photographs of fairways. So we built a floor-to-ceiling sculpture from vintage golf bags, carved topographic reliefs of legendary courses, and made an installation of “Aprons”, created with AstroTurf, golf gloves, pencils, leather golf club handles, the working materials of the sport rendered as art objects. The collection is specific to Texas, to the game's history there, to the particular culture of a place that takes its golfers seriously.

Sports bars are their own discipline. The audience knows too much to be fooled by anything generic.

The sports bar at the Gaylord Pacific Resort: 78 authentic stainless steel kegs, hand-painted in the team colors of every San Diego franchise — the Padres, the Gulls, SDSU, SD Loyal, the Legion, the Wave — mounted across an entire wall, roughly 32 feet wide and 14 feet tall. The colors work collectively, a grid that reads as the full texture of a sports city. 

Getting there was a feat of engineering and installation coordination with every keg on hidden hardware. Kegs are heavy. The custom armature and hidden mounting hardware had to be engineered to carry that load invisibly. The result looks inevitable, which is usually the sign that nothing about making it was.

What draws us to athletic environments is the same thing that draws us to any hospitality project: the stories are already there. The history of a ballpark, the evolution of equipment, the names on the walls of a clubhouse, these are rich, specific, and often underused. Our job is to surface them in ways that feel authentic, informative, and most of all fun. Not just decorative.