Last December, the team behind hospitality company Great Wolf Lodge came to business partners Troy Stanley and Logan Beck with a bit of a challenge. In order to promote their soon-to-open Webster megaresort, the group wanted a showstopper for the most eclectic annual showcase of quirkiness—the Houston Art Car Parade.

So, Stanley and Beck did what smart guys do. They turned their creative team loose. Building off of Wiley the Wolf, a main character in the Great Wolf Lodge story, they crafted a fully customized art car out of reclaimed materials, complete with a waterslide. A crowd of more than 200,000 spectators who lined the streets of Downtown in April saw the unique vehicle and learned about the new resort—mission accomplished.

Beck and Stanley are the duo behind rootlab—a quiet yet prolific Houston design and fabrication studio that’s gaining a national reputation. In recent years, rootlab has created some of the most recognizable installations at area museums, been tapped to fashion a pop-up for Crown Royal at the Houston Livestock Show & Rodeo, and worked with brands from Nike to NPR to develop one-of-a-kind activations. Now the company has its sights set on projects from Hollywood to Las Vegas.

Beck, Stanley and former partner Eric Hester—all Houston natives—launched rootlab a decade ago as a sort of nexus of art, architecture and design. Early projects centered around hospitality design, from coffee shops to cocktail lounges.

Home for Creatives

While doing small projects through rootlab, the duo also worked for Houston-based exhibits firm PBE during the redevelopment of the Houston Museum of Natural Science’s (HMNS) Weiss Energy Hall. Eventually both Beck and Stanley returned full time to rootlab where their work with PBE and HMNS continued to pay dividends. The firm’s big break came in late 2019 when rootlab inked a contract to reimagine HMNS’ chemistry and physics hall Matter & Motion. That deal took rootlab to new digs—a 45,000-square-foot warehouse in Fifth Ward that today houses a team of nearly 40 artists, engineers and fabricators.

“To make a home for really creative people and allow them to use that passion in all of these projects we’re able to bring in—that brings us satisfaction,” Beck said. “It’s super fun to watch our artists rise to the occasion.”

Helping bring the rootlab team’s designs to life is a particularly extraordinary piece of machinery. The firm’s KUKA robotic arm—one of only a handful in Texas—is a massive machine that can sculpt nearly anything at scale. Last year, the team used the KUKA arm to create a 53-foot megalodon for the blockbuster Sharks! exhibit at HMNS. The robot also played a role in fabricating some of the exhibits the team built for the 15,000-square-foot Matter & Motion interactive hall and assisted in bringing King Tut’s tomb to life in the museum’s Ancient Egypt exhibit.

“We love taking complex ideas and creating something real,” Stanley said. “You have to be creative to do what we do, and we built an extremely creative team.”

Homegrown, Going Big

Houston itself has played a considerable role in rootlab’s success story. Thanks to the city’s robust energy sector, the team had access in the early days to machinery and equipment that might otherwise have been scarce or nonexistent. “You can have anything made here,” Stanley said. “That access to expertise and machinery helps us solve challenging problems in ways we simply couldn’t in other places.”

The partners are proud of the way they’ve built their business—with the skills learned and funds earned from each project helping to land the next. “Because we’re from here, went to school here and started our careers here, we have solid rolodexes of clients and other connections that have helped us get where we are today,” Beck said. “That just wouldn’t have been as easy outside of our hometown.”

So what’s next for rootlab? The group is focusing its attention on major institutional projects for clients such as museums, healthcare institutions and large-scale developers. They’re working on a project for a hospital in the Texas Medical Center, creating multiple exhibits for the soon-to-open Meow Wolf interactive art experience, and developing a major art installation for Tulsa International Airport. Stanley and Beck say they would like to bring their expertise to organizations like Space Center Houston and Children’s Museum Houston, as well as companies and developers looking for something unique to greet guests.

After all, Beck said, blockbuster projects that make crazy ideas real is what the company does best.

Written by A.J. Mistretta

Above photo: Stanley (left) and Beck in rootlab's studio 

Photos: Portraits by Daniel Ortiz; Complete project images courtesy of rootlab