The brief was one line long: make it feel like the first hot day. No beach, no sea, no people. So the set became a pink wall, an orange string chair and forty paper cocktail umbrellas on fishing line, each one hung at a slightly different height so they read as falling rather than floating.
The pink came first. I tried three before this one: a salmon that looked tired under the lights, a magenta that fought the chair, and this, which is closer to the inside of a watermelon than anything on a paint chart. The chair is the only strong orange in the picture, and everything else — the teal towel, the tote bag, the palm leaves — is there to make the orange look hotter.
A set is finished when you can take nothing else away and it still says summer.
The hat and the sunglasses were the last thing in and very nearly the first thing out. Without them the chair is furniture. With them, somebody has just got up to fetch a drink.
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