I’m not apologizing for having a habit of envisioning the rest of my day before I've finished the first nine.
There might be another nine waiting for me, a few putts I'd like to have back, and a scorecard that has already begun making accusations. Still, my mind wanders. I'm thinking about lunch. The light coming through the clubhouse windows. A cold drink, something salty, the particular satisfaction of slipping out of my golf shoes and into something that makes me feel like myself again. Slides. Definitely slides.
I love everything a good day of golf makes possible, including the architecture that makes those possibilities available.
A golf course has a lot going on. Every bunker, slope, sightline, and approach has been considered for the experience it creates. Architects spend years studying how a player moves through a landscape, where the eye travels, how the body responds to a change in elevation, and what makes someone want to play a specific hole again.
Why don’t we extend the same imagination to the rest of the property?
We skip over the transition from the eighteenth green to the clubhouse or the distance between the locker room and the dining room. We forget to see whether the terrace catches the afternoon sun, where I can leave my bag, change my shoes, and find my people. These decisions shape my experience as surely as the routing of the course itself.
Architecture is always making an argument about how life should be lived. The weight of the door, the warmth of timber beneath my hand, the sound of shoes moving from stone to carpet are all good reasons to argue. I like a room with a little age on it and windows that know exactly what to do with the afternoon light. I appreciate beautiful materials and the quiet confidence of a place that has no need to announce how much it costs.
Equally, a lady will fall in love with the local clubhouse where the chairs don't match, the fries are excellent, and somebody's auntie has been holding court at the same table since eleven.
Money can buy the building, but it takes considerably more imagination to make people want to inhabit it. Spatial intelligence is not new to me. As a Black woman, I've known it in homes where the kitchen becomes the center of the party, regardless of how beautifully the living room has been arranged. It has a rhythm. The architecture accommodates the way people actually gather, linger, eat, laugh, and occasionally disappear for a little peace.
I keep that same awareness about a golf course. Think about Clearview Golf Club in East Canton, Ohio. In 1946, William Powell began building a golf course on former farmland. His daughter Renee would grow up playing there and become the second Black woman to compete on the LPGA Tour. His son Larry would spend decades caring for the grounds.
It’s a lesson on how to design a landscape around the life you intend to live.
A daughter learning the game on land her father shaped. It’s in the repetition of footsteps, the familiarity of the greens, the accumulated knowledge of how the property changes with the seasons. A family building a sporting tradition into the physical geography of a place.
Clearview's significance lives in its history and in the extraordinary practicality of its existence. Powell imagined a golf course and built one. He determined where the fairways would run, where people would gather, and how the land would serve the game. The architecture gave a family's ambition a physical address. That is beautiful. It’s important that the commercial golf space keeps that energy, especially as more women become founders, investors, and consumers.
The industry has become increasingly interested in women’s apparel, equipment, instruction, travel, and hospitality to name a few. The conversation has gotten very interesting, and I have thoughts and questions, especially about the physical environments being created around that interest.
Because a Black woman doesn't experience a golf course as a collection of revenue categories. She experiences it through her body.
She arrives, walks, plays, eats, rests, changes clothes, meets friends, and decides whether she'd like to stay. The architecture determines how comfortably those activities relate to one another. A thoughtful floor plan can make an afternoon feel effortless. A poorly considered one can turn a perfectly good day into a series of minor logistical negotiations.
Travel with me: it’s a golf weekend with friends. There's the course, naturally, but also the hotel, the restaurant somebody has already researched, the shops worth visiting, and the possibility of extending the trip another day. The pleasure comes partly from how these experiences connect. A good destination knows the choreography.
Pinehurst, where The Deuce overlooks the eighteenth green of No. 2 has a simple architectural relationship with a rather lovely effect: the round ends, but the golf remains part of the room. Players become spectators. A difficult finishing hole becomes entertainment for people who have already made peace with their own scorecards.
The placement matters and so does the view. The restaurant has a relationship with the course that gives people a reason to remain in its orbit. That additional hour alone has commercial value.
Architecture influences how long people stay, what they encounter, and where they choose to spend money. A generous terrace can turn a round into lunch. A beautiful hotel lobby can persuade someone to linger over another drink, while an awkward transition between facilities can send them straight to the parking lot. None of these outcomes is guaranteed by design alone, but the physical environment makes certain behaviors easier and more appealing.
This is where I think golf's commercial imagination could be fun.
A woman may love golf and care equally about the architecture of her hotel, the quality of the restaurant, the local shops, and the possibility of doing absolutely nothing for a few hours. She might enjoy competition and have a weakness for beautiful linens. She may want a serious practice session in the morning and a long lunch with her friends afterward. A magical amount of range, right? The architecture of a destination can acknowledge that range. It can create places for movement and stillness, company and privacy, athletic effort and unapologetic leisure. The businesses that understand these relationships have opportunities to earn more than the price of a round.
This is part of why I started PARLO.
Golf is a beautiful way of studying a place and the people who give it character. The land is designed, the rituals are inherited, the architecture is intentional, and somewhere in the middle of all that planning, people arrive with their own ideas about how they'd like to spend their time.
Through PARLO's newspaper and Regional Archive, I study the culture surrounding the game with an eye for design, hospitality, commerce, and the occasional expensive misjudgment. The After-Round Standard gives that curiosity some discipline, considering how the body, identity, environment, and emotions shape our experience of a place. I want to know what makes a destination memorable, what earns its reputation, and whether the people responsible for creating it understand the difference.
My perspective as a Black lesbian woman is central to that curiosity. Culturally, I know how to give a room a personality and make beauty and pleasure feel like ordinary parts of living. That knowledge belongs in conversations about architecture, hospitality, and the future of leisure.
There's money in understanding it, too. The next opportunity in golf may have less to do with persuading women to play and considerably more to do with understanding the lives they're already living.
Architecture always communicates who belongs. It tells us what a place values, how its owners imagine people spending their time, and whether that imagination has any range.
I respect a property with range, especially one that knows a woman can take her golf seriously and still expect an excellent lunch.
