Design is good business, Thomas Watson Sr. said, and nowhere has that struck me more recently than on a padel court in a converted warehouse just outside the city, where the lighting and the sound system were something quietly sophisticated. Nobody needed either, but we loved both. That was the point.

Padel is having its moment in North America the way it had its moment in Spain a decade ago, and watching that moment unfold is, frankly, a masterclass in how thoroughly a sport can be designed rather than simply played. Tennis, for all its history, still carries the residue of the public court: chain-link fences, cracked asphalt, and dandelions growing in-between cracks leads to a certain municipal indifference. Padel arrived here fully formed, branded, aestheticized, already understanding that the experience surrounding the game is the actual product.

Walk into one of these clubs and you’ll notice the choreography immediately. The check-in is frictionless because someone spent real money on padel club management software that lets you book a court, reserve a locker, and order a negroni all before you’ve laced up. The glass walls of the courts aren’t just functional, they’re staged, angled so that whoever is watching from the lounge gets the best views, because being watched while you play is, quietly, part of what people are paying for. The changing rooms smell deliberately of something vaguely related to Aesop’s Hwyl The towels are the kind of white that only exists when someone else is doing the laundry..

None of this is subtle once you start looking for it, and I say this as someone who genuinely enjoys the sport and also cannot stop noticing the machinery underneath it. What padel clubs have figured out, faster and more cynically than most tennis clubs ever bothered to, is that the racket sport itself is almost incidental. What’s being sold is proximity to a certain kind of life, well-lit, well-scented, socially legible, the kind of place where showing up already signals that you belong there.

I find myself both drawn to it and slightly repelled, which is probably the most honest way to describe most bougie design. The court is genuinely a pleasure to play on. The experience wrapped around it is also, unmistakably, a sorting mechanism, filtering for people who can afford the membership, the equipment, and more specifically, the leisure hours on a Tuesday afternoon. Design doesn’t just shape how a space looks. It decides, quietly and efficiently, who gets to move through it comfortably and who feels the friction immediately.

That tension, between genuine enjoyment and clear-eyed awareness of what’s being engineered around you, is probably where this blog will keep living. Not rejecting beautiful, well-designed spaces outright, but refusing to pretend the beauty is neutral. It never is. And as we progress further and further into late-stage capitalism I think that instead of products, companies will start designing their own profit after experiences.

It’s better business for them anyway.