Brian Slawnik earned a degree in architecture from the University of Virginia in 1994. Golf started as a side curiosity. It didn’t stay one for long.

He spent his first years out of school as a greenkeeper, first at Glenmore Country Club in Keswick, Virginia, and then at Oakland Hills Country Club in Michigan, where he helped prepare the course for the 1996 U.S. Open. That work led him to Michigan State University’s two-year Turfgrass Management Program, where he graduated with honors in 1998. His internship put him on the construction crew at Beechtree in Maryland with Renaissance Golf Design, and he never really left. He went on to build on several more RGD projects, did construction work with Chip MacDonald & Sons at Atlantic City Country Club and Lighthouse Sound, and shaped at The Kingsley Club in Michigan. In 1999, during construction at Pacific Dunes, he became the first RGD intern to stick around long enough to be named a full-time design associate.

Brian cares about craftsmanship at every stage of a project. He’s especially proud of the parts golfers never notice: the tee surrounds, fairway contours and rough tie-ins that make a course feel like it was simply found rather than built. When that work is done right, it disappears.

He also loves how each project brings new land and a new community. His family often travels with him; over the years they’ve collected quite a few homes away from home, including one in Scotland, where his son turned three.