Airbnb

Overview

Location: Miami
Type: Brand Campaign
Year: 2025

Walk into our studio in West Hollywood on any given day and you'll find the ten-foot work tables surrounded by team members from interiors, architecture, product and graphic design, comparing samples, holding a stone up against a fabric, asking someone else what they think. Very little gets decided alone. Creative exchange is at the core of our practice. In December 2025, Airbnb brought that practice, and Kelly's expertise, to their community at Art Basel Miami Beach: two intimate workshops, bookable as an Airbnb Experience, teaching guests her method for curating a vibe tray, the foundation of every project that starts in the studio. Rather than approximate the studio, Kelly and Airbnb brought it to Miami. Our sample library shipped from Los Angeles for guests to work with, our floor-to-ceiling moodboards recreated, the studio playlist, down to our signature scent in the air.

The Partnership

Airbnb has always been about spaces that belong to someone, which is what we look for in every project: a room with an actual point of view in it, one that reflects the person who lives there. Experiences go even a step further, letting you spend time with the people behind those places.

Our work usually reaches people as a finished space, whether a hotel lobby or a photograph of a room after every decision has been made. Experiences gave us a way to share the practice behind it. For Art Basel Miami Beach, that meant giving Airbnb's community a seat at our studio table.

Kelly's Basel

Guests were asked ahead of time to come with a project or a space in mind. They arrived with real ones: a flower shop in New York, a fashion designer's first retail space in Mexico City, a large-scale artwork that needed placing in a Miami studio, a weekend house going up in Montana.

Kelly walked them through the exercise our team runs at the start of every project. A vibe tray begins with something that has nothing to do with interiors – a photograph, a painting, a color someone remembers from a trip – and turns that feeling into materials you can hold – wood, stone, tile, glass, fabric, paint chips, an object with no obvious use. When it works, the tray becomes the vocabulary for the whole project, and every decision after it gets measured against it.

Kelly began with trays from her own projects, talking through why each material was sitting next to the others. Then she gave a prompt and everyone built their own, pulling from the shelves, cutting into images, disagreeing pleasantly about a shade of green. No two looked alike, and none were supposed to. The method exists to help each person find their own creative voice.

Watching everyone collaborate, ask each other for feedback, share ideas — it reminded me that the best creative work happens through exchange and trust. That's constant in my studio.

Kelly Wearstler