Passion has always been the driving force for Brad Davis and Janis Provisor, the husband-and-wife duo behind Fort Street Studio. Twenty years ago,a trip to Hangzhou, China—a center of the silk industry—led them to design their own floor covering. That whim has since grown into a global carpet empire, with showrooms from New York to Hong Kong.

Strada in blue carpet, one of eight designs from Fort Street Studio’s new Progetto Passione Collection, debuting in collaboration with Sotheby’s this month.

Today the couple continues to travel the world, most recently finding inspiration in Roccantica, Italy, a hilltop community some 40 miles northeast of Rome. After wandering quaint streets, Provisor painted a series of abstract watercolor vignettes, which Davis has subsequently scanned and developed as weavable patterns on a computer. “The watercolor can be the end or the beginning,” Provisor says of their improvisational process, the results of which are eight new hand-knotted silk carpets.

Canto in color rug.

Titled Progetto Passione, Italian for “passion project,” the limited-edition collection debuts this month at Fort Street Studio’s Manhattan gallery. The exhibition is mounted in collaboration with Sotheby’s—a fitting partner for makers whose work straddles the art-design divide. In perhaps the most painterly carpet, splashes of pink—interwoven with rosy threads of copper—pop against a creamy background. Another rug features jewel-tone X shapes repeated in a grid, their lines bleeding into a deep gray. Says Davis, “We just felt we wanted to do something different, free from any constraints yet still recognizably us.” fortstreetstudioom