One of my most exciting projects this year is designing the Private Dining Room at the Masterpiece Art Fair in London, a fair I absolutely love as it showcases the very best in cross collecting. I was enormously flattered when I was asked to create a colourful and Cuban-inspired design for their dining room.  I often find inspiration in works of art and using art as a point of departure for a commission by Masterpiece seemed like a natural one.  Sometimes I translate the essence of the artwork into the colour palette for a room, or to combine unusual textures. For Masterpiece, I looked to the work of  one of my favourite artists, cubist Cuban master Wifredo Lam, to inspire the design of a very special wallpaper designed with my longtime collaborators at Fromental.

I started by looking at Lam’s strikingly coloured painting, La Jungla. The summery turquoise, blue and green shades resonated with me as they embody the Caribbean palette of both Cuba and of Miami, my hometown. We created a design that looks to the forms and geometries of the Lam painting in a more abstract and organic way. The next step was creating the colour palette, and we used pieces of semi precious stones to develop each vibrant shade. We played with the design in watercolour to get the correct balance of colour. Then Fromental created incredible textures for each element of the paper. The result is Ambia, a wallpaper that embodies the energising spirit of Caribbean warmth and style.