Fortnum and Mason, Hong Kong

When Fortnum & Mason opened their Hong Kong flagship, they needed a painted world on the walls. Not a pattern, not a printed wallcovering from stock: a hand-made environment that carried the full weight of a 300-year-old British institution into a completely new context. That was the commission Martin Brudnizki Design Studio brought to me in March 2019.

The brief was simple in ambition, intricate in execution: to create an immersive mural narrative spanning the ground floor and a sweeping staircase at K11 MUSEA, one of Hong Kong's most prestigious cultural retail destinations. The centrepiece was a "Tall Trees" mural rising seven metres to fill the full height of the staircase void, guiding guests upward to the 181 Restaurant above.

The initial brief suggested a Cantonese landscape. What emerged, through conversation and research, was something more unexpected: a British countryside that feels fantastical rather than literal, fresh rather than nostalgic, hopeful rather than heritage-heavy. Fortnum's is a brand that has always understood the difference between tradition and stuffiness. The mural had to know that too.

The architectural composition draws on a 17th-century verdure tapestry as its structural foundation, with the treatment of depth informed by the 15th-century Flemish master Joachim Patinir, whose receding landscapes carry the eye through layers of atmosphere into the far distance. These are not references visible to the eye; they are the bone structure beneath the surface, the reason the composition holds at seven metres as well as it does at seven centimetres on a screen. The palette was developed to sit precisely within Fortnum's world: eau de nil, the brand's signature shade, runs through the landscape, anchored against the store's ruby red carpet below.

No Fortnum's project should be without its secrets, and this one has many. Woven into the landscape are the Tea Temple and rooftop beehives from Piccadilly, flying teacups echoing the famous staircase, orange trees heavy with marmalade promise, and a pineapple for hospitality. Merino sheep graze alongside egrets and pelicans. The lion and the unicorn appear, but not as they do on the crest: here they move independently through the landscape, following their own narratives, freed from the formality of the royal livery. These are the details that reward a slow look. They are also the details that make a painted environment feel genuinely made, rather than designed.

Every element was painted by hand in my Hastings studio using broad brushstrokes and my signature distressed finish, building the warmth and texture that only comes from paint applied to a physical surface. The finished artwork was then scanned and digitised at high resolution for production as wallpaper, scaled to fit the complex architectural shapes of the space: the soffits, the bulkheads, the reveals. Getting a hand-painted mural to behave across that kind of architectural complexity requires as much technical rigour as it does artistic judgment. This is the core of the paint to pixel to print process. The trace of the hand travels through every stage, from the first brushstroke in the studio to the final installation seven metres up a staircase in Hong Kong.

If you are opening, expanding, or repositioning a retail or hospitality space and wish to see that vision articulated through paint,  I welcome an early conversation.