Why You Should Head to Round-Top With Your Leadership Team This Weekend

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Many of us are familiar with High Point Market; it’s the locus of design twice a year, after all. But with its sprawling fields, one-of-a-kind finds, layered textures, rare objects with storied pasts, Round Top is everything we love about design. It really captures the fun side of being a designer. If you’re thinking of heading there solo to scout product or source for a client project, consider taking your team with you. The real value of a weekend at Round Top might have less to do with antiques—and more to do with your team.

Bringing your leadership team to Round Top is—of course—a fun diversion, but it’s also a smart, intentional way to recharge your firm’s creative energy, deepen relationships, and spark the kind of big-picture thinking that rarely happens inside your studio walls. Here’s why a shared weekend in the Texas sun might be exactly what your team needs right now.

5 Reasons Why You Should Bring Your Team to Round Top This Spring

#1 To Step Outside the Studio, Reset the Dynamic

Creative leadership can be intense. You’re managing projects, yes, but you’re also managing people, vision, budgets, and emotions. In the thick of a busy quarter, even the most aligned leadership teams can start to feel transactional. Meetings become status checks. Communication becomes utilitarian. There’s little time or space to reflect, recalibrate, or reconnect.

Round Top changes that. The act of getting in a car, stepping into a new physical space, and immersing yourselves in something tactile and inspiring breaks the daily rhythm in the best possible way. Suddenly, you’re fellow design lovers again—not just partners in droll, daily operations. You’re on a shared adventure and re-engaging with the craft that brought you together in the first place.

The slower pace of browsing, bartering, and meandering through stalls opens up entirely new kinds of conversations. These conversations strengthen trust, spark curiosity, and reveal what each of you is really craving or excited about in the months ahead.

#2 Round Top Is Dynamic, Which is Ideal for Developing Creative Discernment

There’s no place like Round Top for refining your team’s shared design eye. As you move through the endless mix of vintage pieces, artisan objects, and layered interiors, your team is forced to edit in real time. What’s compelling? What feels aligned with your studio’s point of view? What’s a “yes” for a specific client, and what’s a “no” because it’s too far outside the visual narrative?

When done together, this kind of shared curation strengthens creative alignment. You start to notice who gravitates toward certain periods or patinas, who has a sharp eye for scale, and who’s thinking about how a piece might be photographed. These insights help you source better but they also help you lead better.

This kind of cohesion and collaboration is priceless in a firm where creative direction is shared among principals, project leads, or senior designers.

#3 You Can’t Strategize When You’re Always in the Weeds

There’s an inimitable kind of clarity that only comes from stepping away from your day-to-day. At Round Top, your calendar is looser. The pressure to perform falls away. You’re walking, talking, browsing, sharing space. And somewhere between a tent of 18th-century French furniture and a tray of fresh tamales, someone says something that unlocks a bigger conversation. Maybe you finally have the space to chat about hiring, about culture, about where you want the business to be next year.

You can’t force these moments in a Monday leadership meeting. But in Round Top’s wide-open setting, they arrive naturally. It’s a place where your mind starts to drift—not aimlessly, but creatively. And when that happens as a team, you start to surface the ideas that actually shape the future of your firm.

Of course, you won’t leave with a five-year plan. But you will reconnect with the kind of thinking that reminds you why you’re building something together in the first place.

#4 The Best Leadership Conversations Happen in Motion

There’s something about walking side-by-side—rather than sitting across a table—that creates room for deeper, more honest dialogue. Movement unspools tension. Conversations that might feel heavy or high-stakes in the office feel easier to navigate when you’re outside, relaxed, sharing a moment of discovery or delight.

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Use that to your advantage. On the walk back to your car or over dinner at Hotel Lulu, ask: What’s feeling exciting right now? What’s draining? What do we want more of? Less of? Where do we feel most in sync—and where could we sharpen communication?

In a boutique firm where every leadership relationship is foundational, that kind of dialogue is fuel for creative fires that actually produce results.

#5 It’s Fun. And That’s the Point.

Design is joyful. And yet, so often, leadership becomes all structure and no spark. Round Top brings the fun back. It lets your team revel in beauty, texture, scale, and discovery, which can get lost when you’re in the office day in and day out. It lets you laugh over impulse buys and weird chairs. It reminds you that this work is rooted in joy, in curiosity, in human experience.

That kind of joy is not frivolous; we really feel that it’s foundational and entirely necessary. It recharges your team’s creative drive and brings a renewed sense of purpose back to the studio.

So yes, maybe you’ll find the perfect credenza for your Aspen project. But you’ll also walk away with something far more valuable: a more aligned, inspired, connected leadership team—ready to return with clarity, cohesion, and fresh ideas for what’s next.

Will We See You at Round Top This Weekend?

If your team’s been stuck in a cycle of back-to-back meetings, tight deadlines, and creative fatigue, you should all head to Round Top (or High Point) for a reset. Rally your leadership team, clear the weekend, and head out with open minds (and good walking shoes).

Seeking more ideas for building strong leadership dynamics in your interior design firm? Join the DesignDash community, where we and other firm owners share real advice, actionable strategies, and inspiration for building beautiful, resilient businesses—together.

If you’re not planning to attend Round Top this Spring, stay tuned for a list of events at the Fall fair. We’ll be there and would love to chat with you! In the meantime, read more about what to expect at Round Top if you haven’t been before.