Asthetique Chose an Original Painting for a Primary Bedroom in Architectural Digest
A design firm with offices in New York, Miami, and Riyadh could specify almost anything for a client's wall. For one primary bedroom, they picked up the phone and asked a painter in Nashville for something a catalog couldn't give them.
Who Asthetique Is
Asthetique is a luxury residential and hospitality design studio founded in 2016 by Julien Albertini and Alina Mehrle, with offices in New York, Miami, and Riyadh. Their work spans private homes and hospitality projects at a scale most painters never see from the inside — the kind of firm that could source art from any gallery, print shop, or art fair in the world, and rarely needs to look past its own network to find one.
What They Asked For
For the primary bedroom of a home they were designing, Asthetique wanted an original — not a print, not an edition. I worked directly with the firm, painting two finished options and presenting them in the round, the way every commission starts in my studio. We chose one together. Architectural Digest published the finished room last August, the painting hanging above the bed exactly where it was built to hang.
Why a Firm With That Reach Chooses an Original
The choice itself is the part I keep coming back to. A studio managing tens of millions of dollars in design and construction a year didn't need to call a painter in Tennessee. They could have specified anything. Instead they asked for a piece built for the exact proportions, light, and palette of one bedroom — because a room considered that carefully deserves art made for it, not selected from a catalog that made it for everyone.
That's the argument for an original, stated plainly: it exists once, it answers to the room it was built for, and it will not turn up in anyone else's house.
Working With the Trade
Every commission for a designer or firm starts the same way — a conversation about the room, then two painted options presented together so you and your client choose, rather than guess. The finished piece ships rolled to a framer near the client, stretched fresh on arrival, and hand-delivered ready to hang. Twenty-plus years of that process now carries press from Architectural Digest to Forbes.
If you're a designer or a firm with a room that wants its own painting, I'd love to talk. You can learn about the trade program here, or start a commission here.
— Angela Simeone, contemporary painter, Nashville
