About

Cuaik | CDS is a multidisciplinary creative group working across architecture, interior design, furniture, art and construction. Founded by Santiago Cuaik in Mexico City in 2012, the studio now works from Mexico City and Madrid on projects across Mexico, the United States, Spain and the Caribbean.

Our first restaurant was Prosecco in Polanco, designed for Grupo Hunan, a hospitality group 34 restaurants strong. There, a shared vision emerged on how hospitality spaces should be inhabited. In 2020, a first commission in Madrid led us to open a second studio in Spain, and in 2025 Rizzoli published The Art of Contemporary Living, our first monograph.

Over more than a decade, we have mastered the art of curating the spaces of everyday life, where design, furniture and art are conceived as one.

A multidisciplinary approach

For us, architecture, interiors, furniture and art are not separate disciplines but parts of a single spatial vision. To carry an idea intact from the first sketch to the last object in the room, we built the practices to do it ourselves: four companies that share one way of thinking and take every project from definition and design to construction, furnishing and installation.

All scales

Over the past decade our work has moved across scales and typologies: private residences and country homes, restaurants and bars, hotels, masterplans, furniture collections and custom details. A masterplan and a door handle demand different technical answers, yet both begin with the same questions. How should a place be experienced? How does it relate to its surroundings? What should it make people feel?

Our most recent work shows that range: Iwashi, a restaurant in Mexico City; the hospitality spaces of Estadio Banorte, reopened for the 2026 World Cup; and Tolsa, a private residence in Mexico City.

Art as a living process

Art is part of the design from the first sketch, never a final layer. Rather than fixed compositions, we conceive projects as living systems that evolve over time, where architecture, furniture, art and objects remain in constant dialogue and spaces keep acquiring new meanings as they are inhabited.

Hospitality

Every project shares one element: hospitality. Growing up among restaurants taught us to design with empathy, for those who use a space and for those who run it, so that every project balances function, experience and atmosphere.

“Hospitality not only influences how I think about a space, it is actually how I understand the world and how I choose to inhabit it.”Santiago Cuaik, Openhouse Magazine No. 24

People

Today Cuaik | CDS is shaped by more than fifty architects, designers, artists and creatives working across disciplines, scales and geographies. Together they bring different perspectives, skills and ways of thinking into a shared practice, one project, conversation and collaboration at a time.

Santiago Cuaik has been included in the Architectural Digest AD100 for Mexico and Latin America in 2021, 2024 and 2025, a list of the hundred most influential figures in architecture, design, art and interiors in the region.

In 2026, Escobal and Estadio Banorte were selected as finalists at the World Architecture Festival, Alila Mayakoba was shortlisted at the AHEAD Awards and recognized in Travel + Leisure’s World’s Best Awards. In 2025, the Architecture MasterPrize recognized Tolsa 443, Petit Hunan and Piztola’s Safari chair.

More than a workplace, the studio is the physical expression of our multidisciplinary practice: an open environment where drawings, models, prototypes, artworks and material samples coexist, and where ideas evolve through dialogue, experimentation and making.