The Grove is set prominently within Discovery Green park, Houston’s new 12-acre urban oasis.  The restaurant architecture takes inspiration from a magnificent, double row of live oak trees that have long inhabited the site.  Indoor and outdoor dining spaces are strung long and thin, just to the south of the oak alley.  Each room has a slightly different vista into the tree canopy, through huge expanses of glass that also admit soft north light.  Broken into a series of smaller parts defined by function, the building complements the natural surroundings with its scale, texture, and material palette.  An intensely colorful, commissioned artwork by Austin artist Margo Sawyer provides the one burst of color.  The Grove is certified LEED Gold for its innovative, sustainable design, together with the park and all of its architecture.

Positioned on a high ridge with commanding views of a lake, mature live oaks and the rounded peak of Chalk Mountain, Rough Creek Lodge is the focus of an 11,000-acre ranch in the Texas Hill Country. The buildings sit long and low, hugging the contours of the hill and nestling into existing trees to form a continuous mass of natural and manmade forms that rim the brow of the promontory. Public spaces and dining areas engage the natural landscape at every opportunity, providing sunny spaces protected from the north wind in winter and shady summer spaces, oriented to prevailing breezes. Each of the 39 guest rooms incorporates porches or terraces, reinforcing the formal and functional merger of the buildings with the land.