Juan Carlos Arcila-Duque has a simple goal: ``I want to be the Latin Ralph Lauren.''
Colombian by birth, American by savvy and ambition, the Miami Beach/New York interior designer loaded a truck with props and two photographers and traveled through South America for a month in a search for just the right houses to decorate. From that trip came his first book, Latin Style (Thomas Nelson, $24.95).
His romanticized settings are meant to reflect four classic Latin styles, while at the same time inferring the four temperate seasons for his American audience so they can adapt what they find. These are the styles he defines:
• Cabana. Open to the sea, decorated with shells, hammocks, tropical fruit and aqua colors of the coast, this is summer. It could be a ''hut'' on the beach, with straw mats, lavender chairs and an ambience of total escape, or a white stone house with one wall of the atrium stained vibrant red for a ''civilized encounter with the tropics,'' away from all that messy sand.
• Pueblo style is sepia-colored for autumn and suggests crisp mountain air, living around fireplaces, golden walls and heavy furniture. Arcila-Duque creates this style as a ''fusion of mestizo, Spanish colonial and African influences.'' He advises dressing wooden furniture with flowers, using pre-Hispanic Indian accessories. ''No color scheme is too outrageous and no tabletop too ornate,'' he believes.
• Haciendas reflect the cowboy, the gaucho of Argentina, old money and fine leather mixed with roses that soften a man's world, where tones of terra cotta and earth prevail. This is winter. Lauren would feel right at home.
• Paradiso is the lush Amazonian rain forest, an eternal spring of verdant growth, with palm leaf table coverings and hand-woven fibers, settings where ''the decor here is defined by its absence, allowing such phenomena as the water lilies, the bright blue sky, the stillness of the water's surface and the colors of the sunset to stand out as the main elements of design.'' This is Arcila-Duque's favorite.
At 41, Arcila-Duque knows where he wants to go. And that's straight into the home furnishings field like his American hero, Lauren. It has to do with his origins.
''I grew up in an artistic family,'' he says. ``My father was a furniture maker with great taste.''
That was in Barranquilla, on the Caribbean coast. When he was 24, he struck out for America, and landed in Miami in 1992. ''I came with the purpose to become an art dealer,'' he says. ''I also curate photography shows.'' (Recently, he curated an exhibit of the Canadian fashion photographer Horst at the Forbes Gallery in New York.)
Unhappily, when the would-be furniture maker arrived, Hurricane Andrew did, too, so he moved to New York, where he took courses at Parsons Design School. There he found what he wanted to do.
After nine years in New York, he returned to Miami, opening a shop called Room, in the Design District. ''I was incredibly successful because I threw great parties,'' he says, ``but I didn't sell a pillow. So I closed and concentrated on private clients.''
His advice to clients: ``Take advantage of the first time we meet. That's when I am a volcano of ideas.''
When his Miami Beach furniture showroom opened in 2001, it was given a New York Times write-up. His client list has included Arquitectonica, Mynt Ultra Lounge on Miami Beach and the Miami Art Center's Ella Fontanals-Cisneros, but he also has worked in Dubai, Germany and South America.
And he gives New Year's Eve parties -- he invited 70 pals in 2007 in Cartagena.
He now divides his time between New York and Miami Beach.
For the first dozen years in the United States, Arcila-Duque did not return to Latin America. ''When I started to go back five or six years ago, I discovered amazing colors and textures -- things I hadn't seen before,'' he says. And he realized he could interpret Latin style ``from an American point of view.''
He decided to express that style through four houses and seasons rather than tackle each country's version.
To further create specific moods of his styles, Arcila-Duque hired Cuban singer/composer Descemer Bueno to write a dozen songs, three for each look. The resulting CD is packaged in the book.
Monica Haim, another Colombian living in New York, wrote the text for Arcila-Duque, and he delivered the book already designed to his publisher. ''They didn't have to do a thing,'' he says.
