08/28/2026
Last night, I finally experienced Craft Cocktails • Fusion • Cocoa Beach in a completely new way—not from a lift or with a brush in my hand, but as a guest enjoying the space with friends.
Only days after opening, Fire + Bloom already feels warm, polished, and completely alive. The creative cocktails and possibly the best fish tacos I’ve ever had made our evening even better. 😊
But the most unexpected moment came when other guests began approaching our table and asking:
“Which one of you is the artist?”
What I’m holding isn’t the menu.
It’s the original design concept I created for the wall behind me.
Long before any paint touched the walls, Bo and Laura could already see the world I imagined for their restaurant. They trusted me to carry that vision from paper to reality.
Now their guests can step inside it.
The direction was clear from the beginning: lush tropical greenery against a dramatic black background.
The scale, however, was strategic.
In the entrance area, guests experience the artwork up close, so I designed smaller, more detailed foliage. In the rear dining room, the murals are viewed from farther away and extend across multiple walls.
Repeating the same small scale there would have made the room feel too busy—and invested considerable time and budget in details guests would never fully experience from that distance.
Instead, I enlarged the foliage and gave the composition more breathing room. It reads clearly from across the restaurant, maintains visual balance, and creates a stronger wow factor within the approved scope.
I also presented variations with and without the red flower from the Fire + Bloom logo. In the end, the foliage and lettering already gave the wall all the impact it needed, so we left the flower out.
Knowing what to add takes a designer’s eye.
Knowing what to leave out takes a designer’s experience.
This is where we began.
The restaurant was still under construction, the booths were filled with boxes, and the walls were waiting to become part of the Fire + Bloom identity.
At this stage, my job was to look at what was there—and see what wasn’t there yet.
It takes imagination to see an immersive tropical world in a blank ro
