Miami has always been a city of reinvention.

The Design District is one of the clearest examples. Over the last two decades, it has transformed from a neighborhood of showrooms, studios and warehouses into one of the city’s most important concentrations of architecture, fashion and design.

Odabashian’s own relationship with the neighborhood began in 2008, when we moved into the Buena Vista Building, just as the company was beginning its transition from a traditional rug business toward hospitality, architecture and design.

From there, we watched the neighborhood change around us. Just behind it, however, Buena Vista tells a different story.

Old houses sit beneath enormous tropical trees. Dense vegetation fills the streets, and within a few blocks, the scale of the city changes.

That contrast became the starting point for our work at The Moore.

The building is more than a century old, standing in the middle of a neighborhood now closely associated with contemporary Miami. It needed a connection to the place around it.

Rather than looking elsewhere for inspiration, we turned toward Buena Vista.

Working with Miami artist Johanna Boccardo, the foliage, shadows and organic forms of the neighborhood became drawings, capturing details from the landscape immediately outside The Moore.

Those drawings became the starting point for the rugs.

Moving from drawing into textile meant working with changes in scale, material and texture. Leaves and organic forms were enlarged, simplified and developed across the surface of the pieces.

The intention was not to create another interpretation of tropical Miami, but to bring something more specific into the building: the visual memory of the neighborhood surrounding it.

The Design District will continue to change. Miami undoubtedly will too. But behind that movement, Buena Vista remains, and some of its leaves now live inside The Moore.