Beach resort art, hand-painted for villas and island hotels

A resort is drawn as a handful of villa types, so specify the art the way the architect drew the villas. Most types need two to five positions:

Send the villa-type drawings or the art page of the FF&E schedule and we price each set per villa. Or send photos of a finished villa and we shortlist catalogue works for every position.

A city hotel with rooms on floors is better served by hotel guest-room programmes, and a single private villa by villas and whole-house projects.

A tropical villa is bright, white-walled and open to a real sea just beyond the glass. A painting competes with that light, so choose colours with enough body to read: turquoise, cobalt and teal against sand and white, or deep greens for the botanicals. Start from the teal and blue collections, and have the colours mixed to your own fabric and stone samples where the scheme calls for it.

Where to hang it. Choose walls that face away from the openings or sit deep under the roof, so the morning and late sun never fall on the canvas; as with any painting, direct sun is best avoided. A piece hung between two bright windows reads as a dark shape, while the same piece on the wall facing them is lit by them.

A pool villa's living pavilion is seen from the deck and the water, an open-sided lobby from the arrival drive. A canvas that suits a bedroom looks like a postcard from fifteen metres. Measure the solid wall, tell us where it is seen from, and we suggest the scale; any work can be redrawn to any size, panoramic formats included.

Very large canvases, and every sculpted or plaster piece, travel stretched rather than rolled, so they are the bulkiest part of a resort shipment: order them early enough to leave room for freight. For one or two oversized pieces on their own, see lobby statement art.

Spa. Sand, cream and sage in sculpted texture: shell and leaf forms, a white tide on sand (more on spas and wellness centres).

Restaurant. Coastal landscapes and sunset seascapes, hung horizontally along the banquette; see art for restaurants and bars.

Beach club and pool bar. Under cover and well back from the sand, this is the place for colour: vibrant sunsets, surfers and crowded beaches.

Covered walkways. Tall verticals in one manner, so the walk to the villas reads as a sequence.

One order can cover all of it, and the spa, the restaurant and the villas count together towards volume pricing.

Most resort projects build one mock-up villa before the rest. Hang its paintings there and the owner, the operator and the designer see the art with the furniture, the timber and the light off the water, which no screen can show. You follow each piece in photos or video while it is painted, so a change is made on the easel, not after the canvas has crossed the ocean.

If the mock-up is not built yet, a piece hung in the sales gallery or the site office does the same job.

Tell us where the art should land: the resort, your site office, a forwarder at the gateway airport or port, or the warehouse consolidating your FF&E. We arrange the shipping there and confirm the cost with you before dispatch. A tranche of rolled tubes usually travels by DHL, FedEx or UPS express; a large order may go by air or sea freight, which costs less and takes longer, so weigh the price against the date the walls must be dressed.

Sculpted surf, plaster and heavy knife-laid works (every TA code in the catalogue, and a few other thickly painted pieces) travel stretched or framed only, unless you agree to a thinner texture that can roll. So a villa run in flat brushwork rolls, and the arrival piece in plaster goes in a box.