There's a chair in Marcela Cure's collection that dissolves into a pool. Not literally, but the gesture in person makes it hard to believe that isn't the case. The chair is part of Materia Coelctiva, her debut collectible design collection: hand-crafted in amber resin, shaped by something between geological patience and sheer force of will, and translucent enough that light moves through it similar to how it moves through water. In the installation Marcela presented at Design Miami last December, the chair appeared to be melting back into the resin pond at its base to return, as she says, to its original matter. The mirror behind the installation allows you, the viewer, to be a witness to the entire process. "I wanted to show how everything goes back it its material," she says. "Going back it its natural form... to its origin."
She doesn't say that abstractly. For Marcela, materials have always been the beginning. She collects, holds, considers what it wants to become before she decides what she wants to make it do. The resin collection features mirrors with tectonic contours, vessels that serve as both utility and myth, and a floor lamp that rises like a monolith to illumination; its an extension of the same instinct she brings to every interior she designs: nothing flat, nothing standard, nothing that doesn't carry some trace of the hand that made it.
How Barranquilla Shaped Marcela Cure's Sense of Boldness
Barranquilla is Colombia's fourth-largest city and sits on the Caribbean coast at the mouth of the Magdalena River, and it has almost nothing in common with the Andean cities like Bogota, which is cold, or Medellin, now famous for its transformation that tends to represent the country abroad. You see, Barranquilla is a port city. It's tropical, vibrant, and architecturally layered with Republican-era facades and mid-century tropical modernism and the kind of improvised creative vitality that comes from a place that has been receiving the world for centuries. Nobel Prize winning author Gabriel Garcia Marquez grew up on this coast. The cumbia was born here. Shakira is from here. And every February, for four days before Lent, El Carnaval de Barranquilla, one of the largest carnivals on earth, takes over the city entirely.
Marcela grew up inside all of this. She says it shaped her ease with boldness, her comfort with risk, and her fundamental conviction that a room should feel like it is ready for something. "People here are less rigid and more easygoing," says Cure. "That makes me comfortable trying new things. Being Risky. Being bold and expressive in my designs."
Cure also is just as quick to note that Barranquilla is not all of Colombia any more than Bogota is. "It's so different, not only between countries, but between cities, Colombia is a vibrant and rich country full of so much variety and cultural roots." Take the coastal identity most Colombians call costeño for example, it carries its own distinct signature: more open, more physical, more likely to have fifty people in the house on a Saturday than a quiet dinner for four. Marcela has three kids and hosts constantly at her house; a note of distinction as more evidence of her design principles; she has never once built a home that didn't account for what happens when it fills up with life and others.
The "Latin Punch" Philosophy Behind Marcela Cure's Interiors
Cure's firm, Marcela Cure Studio, was established in 2015 even though work for her began earlier. She designed her own homes first, then friends noticed, then family, then clients she had never met. By the time the studio had a name, she had already developed a vocabulary: the "Latin Punch," not color for its own sake, but boldness deployed with sophistication, warmth worn without apology, and spaces that feel curated and alive simultaneously. Even though she's based in Barranquilla, she works across Colombia and the United States with a range of commissions that reflect the full ambition of her practice. There are residential projects: apartments, houses, and second homes in Miami commissioned by New Yorkers who want something looser and more sensory than their primary residences. There's also corporate and hospitality work. And there's frequent demand for the collectible objects she designs.
Inside the Miami Home That Shows Marcela Cure's Design Method
One of her most celebrated projects is a 6,500sqft family home in Miami that began with a fragmented layout, spaces that didn't flow well, rooms drowning in beige, everything sourced from the same suppliers, and the cumulative effect was a home that lost its sense of identity. "It seemed lifeless to me," says Cure. "It certainly didn't reflect my clients' personalities." Where she takes things next reflects the intricacies that go along with being an interior designer. She reworked the layout to prioritize natural light as a palette setter. She then used the soft neutral tones as a surface and then added markers of character: green marble through the kitchen, walnut cabinetry, liquid-metal doors, and brown leather barstools. The entryway had an onyx console table paired with a sculptural leather-wrapped mirror. In the living room you'd see B&B Italia sofas, and Warton chairs by Charles Zana; signs of a room no longer struggling to reflect its intentional composure.
The ability to navigate between her instincts and her clients' comfort zone to bring more boldness but with refinement is something Cure has developed into a method. She describes it as a complicated balance: fun but not tacky, colorful but never chaotic, sophisticated without coldness; proving the Latin Punch is less duplicatable technique and more of an instinctual calibration.
Marcela Cure's Sculptural Objects Explore Material and Myth
The objects Marcela Cure makes herself occupy a different kind of space in her practice and reveal perhaps more than her interior design projects what truly inspires her.
Her sculptures celebrate the female bod with a frankness that is neither decorative nor aggressive. A side table whose base is formed from interlocked female legs, the figures holding a rough stone surface aloft is both functional as well as confrontational, useful, and in a way mythological all at once. If you continue to explore her works you'll see figurative torsos with fractures along their lines suggesting damage and resilience, spinning tops, birds, and even candle vessels that carry an ancient motif in its shape and material.
These pieces are more of a parallel to her interior design work, almost as a dialogue between the same materials. She describes her process at the atelier as one of the purest pleasures of her work: going in, starting from scratch, experimenting, and letting a material suggest a direction before committing to it. "The collection usually begins from the material itself. Something lights up in my head, and I'm just compelled to get to work." For Materia Colectiva, that material was amber resin. Each piece is limited edition, handcrafted in Colombia using artisanal techniques so the surfaces retain the evidence of how they were made.
Why Lighting is Central to Marcela Cure's Interiors
For Marcela Cure, lighting is more of a project collaborator than a product category afterthought.
Her recipe includes fewer overhead fixtures, always. Pendants here and there are cool, but bring on more floor lamps, sconces, and table lamps. To Cure, the same room should feel different on a Tuesday morning than on a Saturday night before people arrive, and the only way to make that possible is to design the electrical plan early in the conversation, before the walls are closed and you can still put lights on different circuits so the moods can be curated beautifully. Too often homes owners make these decisions too late or not at all and the spaces in the house are stuck only able to tell a limited story. This practical approach is evidence of Cure's studies as a civil engineer, the understanding that beautiful homes require infrastructure, and that the emotional register of a space is determined as much by the technical decisions a homeowner makes as much as its the aesthetic ones.
Marcela Cure's Advice for Creating a Home With Character
If you were to ask Marcela Cure for advice as a homeowner looking to make their space feel more intentional, she'll hit you with the same word before anything else.
Patience.
"People want to go to one store and the house done. You can't do it that way. You need to let your home speak to you," she says. "Get pieces that bring emotion to you, that make you feel something, that remind you of something whether that's a place you traveled to or had a good time at. That's what going to bring character and emotion into your home."
She'd encourage you to avoid mass production, seek out artists and hand-crafted fixtures. Find the story behind the work and see if it resonates with you personally. Build a collection of things from different people, different places, and different backgrounds. This, Cure says, is the only kind of spaces she's been interested in making.
Somewhere in her atelier in Barranquilla right now, there are drawings and materials for a new collection she's gave us a sneak peak about. She hasn't yet begun the prototyping stage, but she is excited to work with this material in that really specific way someone is excited about working through a puzzle they haven't solved yet, which in her experiences and by her own admission, is the feeling that has driven everything she's ever made.
Marcela Cure is the founder of Marcela Cure Studio, based in Barranquilla, Colombia. Her practice spans residential and hospitality interiors across Colombia and the United States, alongside an ongoing series of collectible design objects and sculptures. Her debut collectible collection, Materia Colectiva, was presented at Design Miami in December 2025.
Image Credits: Photography by Natalia Soto and Mateo Soto. Renderings courtesy of Marcela Cure Design Studio.