LAITY LODGE Laity Lodge
Laity Lodge Renovation + Reopening, 2015–2017

How do you make an old place feel new without losing its soul?

Laity Lodge Renovation + Reopening, 2015–2017

Laity Lodge had already been welcoming retreat guests into the Texas Hill Country for more than half a century when it closed for an extensive renovation in 2015. The goal was not reinvention for its own sake. It was to make a beloved, sacred place work better: improving guest rooms, arrival, circulation and connections to the landscape, all without polishing away the qualities that had made the Lodge feel unlike anywhere else.

For me, the renovation became a distinct season within a much longer relationship with Laity Lodge and the H. E. Butt Foundation. Having already helped develop the larger Foundation rebrand and the Lodge identity, the conversation shifted to how might that identity actually infuse the place, now that it’s being renovated?

A brand becomes a place

The renovation brought together architecture, interiors, landscape, operations and communications in an unusually integrated way. Overland Partners and Mark Eubank led the architectural work; Kimberly Renner shaped the interiors; Christine Ten Eyck led landscape architecture. They worked closely with the Butt-Rogers family, Steven Purcell, Gate Davis, Glenn Echols and a larger internal team responsible for stewarding both the property and the guest experience.

My role lived in the spaces between those disciplines: helping translate the Lodge’s identity and point of view into the physical experience of returning guests.

That meant thinking about much more than graphics. Gate and I would ask questions like, How did someone know they had arrived? What should catch their attention—and what should disappear into the landscape? How much information did a guest actually need? What materials felt native to the landscape? To the architecture? Where should something feel precise, and where could it retain the evidence of a human hand?

The guiding idea was less about “branding a property” than about listening to the place carefully enough to know what belonged there.

Designing the arrival

One of the most visible projects was a new wayfinding system for the Lodge and surrounding campus.

The signs needed to solve practical problems created by a sprawling Hill Country property, but they also had to feel as though they belonged to the landscape rather than having been added afterward. We developed a restrained family of signs using simple forms, dark earth-toned finishes, high-contrast typography and an intentionally limited visual vocabulary.

The system extended from major arrival and directional signs to parking, accessibility and smaller site markers. In a few key interior locations—including Reception, the Library, Cedar Brake and the Great Hall—I decided to create hand-painted lettering, allowing the system to become less perfect and a little more personal as guests moved deeper into the Lodge.

The result was deliberately understated: enough information to orient someone without turning the retreat into a branded environment.

From identity system to guest experience

The reopening also required a broad layer of guest-facing materials: maps, room information, printed collateral, program materials, environmental graphics and the hundreds of small decisions that help a place feel coherent.

The existing Laity Lodge identity gave us a strong foundation. Its simple monoline geometry and quatrefoil-inspired mark could move easily between print, signage and the built environment without competing with the architecture or landscape. That restraint became especially important for the renovation.

The best solutions often felt almost inevitable: simple typography on glass, a sign positioned exactly where someone needed it, a fresh map that made the Canyon understandable, a material choice that seemed to have come from the site itself.

Preserving the irregular parts

Laity Lodge is a hospitality brand that has never behaved exactly like a conventional hospitality brand. That was something worth preserving.

It is simultaneously a retreat center, an architectural place built with intentional monastic elegance, a piece of family history, a spiritual community, and a somewhat eccentric collection of traditions accumulated over decades. A perfectly standardized system would have been the wrong answer.

So we allowed room for variation and discovery. The renovated Lodge could be cleaner and more coherent without becoming sterile. New elements could coexist with old ones. Hand-painted language could sit beside carefully fabricated signage. Serious design could make room for occasional wit.

That tension between order and irregularity, refinement and informality, became an important part of the reopening work.

The reopening

When Laity Lodge reopened in 2017, the most satisfying outcome was not that everything looked new.

It was that it still felt unmistakably like Laity Lodge.

The guest experience was clearer. The architecture opened more intentionally toward the Canyon. The wayfinding worked. Rooms and gathering spaces felt renewed. The visual identity could now be encountered not simply on a brochure or website, but in the accumulated experience of moving through the place.

For a designer, it was an unusual privilege: the opportunity to help shape how an organization presented itself and how people physically encountered a place that already meant a great deal to them.

The renovation was one season in a much longer relationship. But it was a particularly concentrated one—a moment when architecture, landscape, interiors, identity and hospitality converged around a shared question:

How do you make a beloved place new without making it less itself?