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The WA Collective is a personal initiative by Nada Debs, born from her travels and encounters with artisans and designers around the world. Each piece introduced into the platform carries with it an unspoken narrative of place and time, where craft becomes a language that expresses something beyond the object itself. Through WA, Nada invites diverse voices to share works that reflect her belief in the power of the hand to foster meaningful cross-cultural dialog. The collective reflects ideas of duality, harmony, and connection, bringing together a global community of contemporary craftspeople while creating opportunities for greater visibility and exchange.

We were invited by Louis Vuitton to participate in LV Mirage, the French luxury house's first platform dedicated to artistic collaborations between the brand and designers working outside its own creative ecosystem. We brought our language of marquetry inlay, mother-of-pearl, and Arab geometric craft into dialogue with Louis Vuitton's iconic codes, including its signature monogram and the vocabulary of travel that has defined the house since its founding in 1854. The result was a meeting between two distinct craft heritages, one rooted in Beirut and the Arab making tradition, the other in Parisian luxury and the art of the trunk.

For Ramadan 2026, we transformed part of our Alserkal Avenue boutique in Dubai into the Ochaya Majlis, a contemplative gathering space created in collaboration with de Gournay, the British luxury wallcovering brand known for its hand-painted and hand-embroidered wall art. The Majlis, the traditional Arab space for receiving guests and sharing conversation, was interpreted here through de Gournay's Deco Palms wallcovering set against our marquetry furniture and brass details. It was a space that held the intention of Ramadan, a month defined by gathering, reflection, and the breaking of bread together.

We opened our first boutique at Alserkal Avenue in Dubai, the cultural district that has become home to some of the UAE's most important contemporary art galleries and creative spaces. The boutique brings together our full range of handcrafted accessories, decorative objects, and furniture in a space designed to reflect the same values that drive the work: materiality, memory, and the handmade. It is our first permanent retail presence in Dubai, and a space where anyone can encounter the studio's world directly, without needing an invitation or an appointment.

We completed the interior renovation of the Okhun Gozar Mosque in Uzbekistan, a historic place of worship that required careful, respectful intervention to restore its spiritual atmosphere while introducing contemporary craft elements. Working with Uzbek artisans and drawing on the centuries-long tradition of geometric pattern in Islamic architecture, we brought new surfaces, lighting, and inlay work into dialogue with the existing structure. The project was one of the most significant sacred commissions our studio has undertaken, and one that required craft to serve devotion rather than decoration.

We collaborated with Laederach, the Swiss luxury chocolate maker known for its precision craftsmanship and high-quality ingredients, to create a limited-edition holiday offering that brought our design language into the context of gifting. The packaging and presentation were designed to carry the same attention to material, pattern, and cultural reference that we bring to our furniture and objects. It was a small but considered exercise in how craft sensibility can transform even the most familiar seasonal ritual into something more meaningful.

We opened a new dedicated bar space within Studio Nada Debs, our Beirut studio and showroom, and marked the occasion with an intimate gathering for the design community, collectors, and friends. The bar brought together some of our newest pieces alongside familiar works, creating a setting in which objects could be experienced in the context for which they were designed: people gathered, in conversation, around things made to last. It was a reminder that the studio is not just a place of making but a place of meeting.

We unveiled new work from our ongoing Gandhara collaboration with Studio Lel at Nomad Abu Dhabi, the itinerant design fair that takes place annually across globally significant architectural and landscape settings. Studio Lel, founded by Pakistani-British designer Zara Latif, has built its practice around the visual heritage of Gandharan art, the ancient tradition that flourished at the crossroads of Central Asia, South Asia, and the Mediterranean. The new pieces expanded the Carapace motif into fresh material combinations, continuing a dialogue between two design practices rooted in distinct but historically connected cultures.

For We Design Beirut 2025, we collaborated with TRAME, a Beirut-based studio working at the intersection of craft and digital fabrication, to reimagine the backgammon board as a designed object. Together we developed custom board designs that merged our marquetry craftsmanship with TRAME's approach to digital pattern generation, producing pieces that were both handmade and algorithmically informed. Backgammon, a game with deep roots in Arab social culture, became the meeting point for two studios whose work sits at the border between tradition and technology.

For In Assembly at We Design Beirut 2025, the annual design festival that brings together Lebanese and international creatives across Beirut, we created Patterns at Play, an installation that reimagined marquetry as a shared, participatory experience rather than a finished object. Visitors were invited to gather around large-format pattern tables and co-create their own arrangements using modular marquetry elements drawn from our geometric vocabulary. It was an experiment in what happens when craft moves from the maker's hands to the audience's, and what patterns people choose to build when given the tools to do so.

Nakhla was an installation we presented at Maraya Art Centre in AlUla, Saudi Arabia, one of the region's most striking cultural venues built entirely from mirrored panels that reflect the surrounding desert landscape. The work took the palm tree, a motif deeply embedded in Palestinian embroidery traditions known as tatreez, and reimagined it through our craft vocabulary of marquetry, colour, and inlay. It was an exploration of how symbols carried within textiles and embroidery can be translated into three-dimensional design objects without losing the cultural weight they carry.

We were invited by The Conran Shop, the iconic British design retailer founded by Sir Terence Conran and known for championing quality design for the home, to give a talk at their Kuwait location. The conversation centred on what it means to take a design practice rooted in Beirut and Arab craft traditions to a global audience, and the responsibility that comes with representing a culture through the objects you make. We spoke about how the line between cultural celebration and cultural commodification is something every designer working with traditional craft has to think about carefully.

We presented a sensory installation at Osaka Expo 2025, the world's largest international exposition bringing together nations and cultures in Japan, in collaboration with Uzbek craftspeople whose making traditions we had first encountered at the Design Doha Biennial. The installation brought together Japanese minimalism and Uzbek craft into a space designed for pause, reflection, and human connection. It was built around the idea that design can create moments of stillness within even the most populated and spectacular of international events.

In collaboration with Em Sherif, the celebrated Lebanese restaurant group known for reviving traditional Levantine cuisine with theatrical presentation, we transformed the maamoul into a multi-sensory design experience under the name OKASHI. The maamoul, a traditional Arab pastry central to celebrations across the Levant, became the starting point for a limited-edition collection that applied our craft vocabulary to objects connected to food, ritual, and gathering. It was a meeting between two Lebanese makers, each rooted in the sensory traditions of the same culture but working in very different materials.

Breathing new life into the traditional Uzbek tapchan for ACDF in Uzbekistan with the introduction of Qosh — a contemporary reinterpretation of the iconic outdoor seating piece. Working closely with Sirojiddin Rakhmatillaev, an Uzbek master of tapchan-making, studying his craft; we designed something entirely new together. Qosh fuses tradition with modern design, bringing a fresh perspective to communal seating.

We were named in Identity Magazine's Top 50, an annual list published by one of the Middle East's leading design and architecture publications recognising the most significant voices shaping the region's creative landscape. The recognition placed us among designers, architects, and creative figures whose work has had a lasting impact on how the region sees itself and presents itself to the world. For us it was an acknowledgement not of a single project but of the accumulated work of over two decades of studio practice.

We collaborated with Stouls, the Paris-based luxury leather brand known for its innovative use of exotic and rare skins in high-end ready-to-wear, to create a collection that brought marquetry and leather into direct conversation. We developed a series of hexagonal geometric patterns drawn from our design vocabulary and applied them directly onto Stouls' signature leather surfaces, treating leather as we might treat wood: as a material to be decorated through precision and repetition. The result was a collection in which the geometry of Arab craft became a formal language equally at home on a leather surface as on a wooden one.

For the third consecutive year, we were named in AD Middle East's AD100 list, Architectural Digest's annual ranking of the most influential and respected designers in architecture, interiors, and product design across the Middle East. The recognition placed us among the designers most consistently shaping the visual and cultural identity of the region, and was a reflection of ongoing work that spans collectible furniture, interior projects, and craft-led collaborations. Being recognised three years in a row felt less like an award and more like an acknowledgement of a sustained commitment to the field.

For the third consecutive year, we were named among AD100's Best Designers in the Middle East and North Africa, the annual Architectural Digest ranking celebrating the most influential voices in design across the region. The recognition spans architecture, interior design, and product design, and has become one of the most closely watched lists in the regional design industry. Three consecutive years on the list reflected a sustained body of work rather than a single project, which is the kind of recognition that means most to us.

At Design Doha, Qatar's biennial design platform bringing together designers, curators, and institutions from across the Arab world and beyond, we joined the Living the Dream: Arab Design Now panel discussion. The conversation explored the optimism and ambition that is currently shaping Arab design, and what it means to build a design practice rooted in regional culture while pursuing an international audience. We spoke about craft as both a creative and cultural responsibility, and the particular energy that exists in the Arab design community right now.

For Eid al-Adha 2024, we collaborated with Dior Beauty to create a series of limited-edition fragrance cases for their La Collection Privee line. Each case was handcrafted in our Beirut studio using our signature techniques: mother-of-pearl inlay, tin work, and hand-carving, applied to Dior's iconic bottle form. It was a meeting of French luxury and Arab craft tradition, made for one of the most significant celebrations in the Islamic calendar.

Following our Grand Prix d'Honneur award in 2023, we were invited to serve as President of the Jury for the Institut du Monde Arabe Design Prize 2024 in Paris. The prize recognises outstanding design work from designers across the Arab world and its diaspora, and chairing the jury gave us the opportunity to support and celebrate the next generation of Arab designers working in craft and contemporary practice. It was a role that felt like a natural continuation of the recognition we had received the year before, turning it outward toward others.

We visited Kohler's San Francisco showroom to speak about the making of the Transcendence collection, the large-scale hammam installation we had created together for Design Miami 2022. The talk gave us the opportunity to walk an American design audience through the process: how the tiles were made from Kohler manufacturing waste, how our craft techniques were adapted to work at architectural scale, and what the hammam means as a cultural form being reinterpreted for a contemporary context. It was a conversation about craft, material innovation, and what a genuine commitment to sustainability in design actually looks like.

At Design Shanghai 2024, one of Asia's leading design fairs and an important annual platform for dialogue between Eastern and Western design cultures, we joined the East meets East panel discussion as part of The New Universal Language of Design programme. The conversation explored how craft serves as a bridge between design traditions that are often discussed as if they exist in opposition to each other. We spoke about our own experience working at the intersection of Arab, Japanese, and European design influences, and what it means to build a design language that is rooted in one culture but speaks beyond it.

For Downtown Design Dubai 2024, we collaborated with de Gournay, the British luxury wallcovering brand known for its hand-painted and hand-embroidered wall art, to create a Majlis installation. The Majlis, a traditional Arab reception room designed for gathering and conversation, was conceived as a complete designed environment, with our marquetry furniture and brass detailing set against de Gournay's Deco Palms wallcovering. It was a meeting between two luxury craft traditions rooted in very different cultural contexts, brought together in a form that is central to Arab social life.

SWIRLMANIA was a collection of handcrafted occasional tables we unveiled at We Design Beirut 2024, the annual design festival that brings together Lebanese and international designers across venues throughout the city. Each table in the collection took our familiar geometric and craft-led vocabulary and introduced fluid, swirling forms, a deliberate departure from the rectilinear patterns our work is usually associated with. The collection was an exploration of what happens to traditional craft techniques when they are asked to follow curves rather than straight lines.

We participated in Doppia Firma, an annual initiative at Milan Design Week that pairs furniture designers with master artisans to create one-of-a-kind pieces that celebrate the intersection of design thinking and craft expertise. Our collaboration was with Artepura, an Italian atelier specialising in high-end leather craftsmanship, and together we created a piece inspired by the natural and architectural harmony of Villa Mozart in Merano, Italy. Marquetry inlay and leather, two very different craft traditions, were brought into direct dialogue on a single object.

At the Design Doha Biennial 2024, Qatar's platform for global design exchange, we worked with Sirojiddin Rahmatillaev, an Uzbek master craftsman known for his expertise in the tapchan, a traditional low outdoor seating platform central to Central Asian communal life. Together we designed Qosh, a contemporary reinterpretation of the tapchan that drew on his deep knowledge of the form and our approach to proportion and material. It was a genuine collaboration between two distinct craft traditions, shaped together from the ground up rather than one interpreting the other.

The Gandhara Carapace Collection, our ongoing collaboration with Studio Lel, the practice founded by Pakistani-British designer Zara Latif, was unveiled in full at Design Miami through Galerie BSL. The collection brought together tables and seating forms surfaced in semi-precious stone and marble mosaic, with each piece drawing on the rich decorative heritage of Gandharan art, the ancient visual tradition that emerged at the crossroads of Central Asia, South Asia, and the Mediterranean. Design Miami, which takes place annually alongside Art Basel Miami Beach, is one of the world's most important platforms for collectible design.

We created the Crafted Mandala for the Life Lebanon Global Gala Dinner 2023, an annual fundraising event supporting the LIFE Education System, an initiative providing quality education to underprivileged children across Lebanon. The piece was a large-scale mandala design worked in marquetry and inlay, combining our geometric design vocabulary with the circular, meditative symbolism of the mandala form. It was auctioned at the gala with all proceeds going directly to support the LIFE Education System's schools and programmes.

For Downtown Design Dubai 2023, we created an installation in collaboration with Kohler Middle East to mark the American brand's 150th anniversary. The installation was conceived as a meditation on water as a symbol of rejuvenation, rebirth, and renewal across cultures and throughout history, themes that have been central to Kohler's identity as a plumbing and bathroom brand since its founding. It brought together hand-worked surfaces and craft-led details with Kohler's products to create a contemplative space within the context of one of the region's busiest design fairs.

We participated in The Candle Project, an initiative by House of Today, a Beirut-based organisation dedicated to nurturing emerging Lebanese design talent, that brought together 10 Lebanese designers to create a series of sculptural candles. Each candle was co-created with artisans from the Beit Chabab Hospital Workshop, a Lebanese institution that provides vocational training and work opportunities for people with disabilities. The entire collection was designed and made in Lebanon, using the act of making as a statement about the continued vitality of the country's craft and design community.

Our Transcending Prayer Rug was included in Scripts and Calligraphy: Paths to the Soul, an exhibition at Madina Art Center in Saudi Arabia exploring the spiritual and artistic dimensions of Arabic script and calligraphy across different art forms and disciplines. The Transcending Prayer Rug translated the geometry of Islamic prayer and the visual language of Arabic script into a handcrafted textile and marquetry work, exploring how devotion and design can share the same object. The exhibition brought together artists and designers working across different mediums united by an engagement with Arabic as a visual, spiritual, and cultural language.

At Menart Fair in Paris, held at the Palais d'Iena and dedicated to modern and contemporary art from the Middle East and North Africa, we presented a curated selection of works through Galerie BSL, our Parisian gallery partner. The presentation included the Gandhara Carapace Table, our collaboration with Studio Lel that brought together Beirut-based marquetry and the visual language of ancient Gandharan art from the Afghanistan-Pakistan region. Menart is one of the few European art fair platforms dedicated specifically to Arab and North African creative voices, making it a meaningful context for this particular work.

We participated in Terroirs Insolites, a Paris-based platform and showroom dedicated to showcasing the finest Lebanese craft and design to European audiences. At a time when Lebanon was going through one of its most severe economic and political crises, Terroirs Insolites played an important role in keeping Lebanese creative work visible internationally and connecting makers in Beirut with buyers and collectors in Europe. Our participation brought a selection of our objects and furniture to new audiences in France who might otherwise have had no access to Lebanese craft at this level.

We were awarded the Grand Prix d'Honneur by the Institut du Monde Arabe, a leading cultural institution in Paris dedicated to promoting Arab art, history, and culture in the West. It was the first time the prize was given to a designer, and it recognised over two decades of work using craft, marquetry, mother-of-pearl, and hand-carving, to bring Arab making traditions into contemporary form. For us, it confirmed that furniture and objects can carry cultural identity as powerfully as any other art form.

We designed the From Sunrise to Sunset collection exclusively for THAT Concept Store, a Dubai-based retail destination known for bringing together the work of emerging and established designers from the region and beyond. The collection drew on the idea of the horizon as a universal symbol of longing and possibility, translating that concept into handcrafted objects using our signature wood and inlay techniques. Each piece captured a different moment in the movement of light from dawn to dusk, using colour and material to mark the passage of time.

We were invited to design one of eight rooms at Beit Tamanna, a dream-like guesthouse created in the Gemmayzeh neighbourhood of Beirut by 13 Lebanese and international designers, each given complete creative freedom over their space. The project was conceived as a design experience as much as a place to stay, with each room a self-contained world. All proceeds from guests staying at Beit Tamanna go directly to the Tamanna Association, which works to fulfil the wishes of children with life-threatening illnesses across Lebanon.

We exhibited the Stitched Horizons collection at Galerie BSL in Paris as part of Rebellious Connections, a group show curated around the idea of design that challenges boundaries between craft, art, and function. The collection consisted of six pebble-shaped chairs, each one handcrafted and upholstered in a way that referenced landscapes and the patterns found in nature, from coastal rock formations to desert terrain. It was presented alongside works by other designers who share a commitment to the handmade object as a cultural statement.

We contributed to the Upcycling Tree Art initiative by Green Cedar Lebanon, an environmental organisation dedicated to reforestation and ecological restoration across the country. Using colourful wood veneer and tin inlay applied to reclaimed tree cross-sections, we created a piece that told the story of a pine tree community, the relationships and interconnections that make a forest more than a collection of individual trees. All proceeds from the sale of contributed works went directly to Green Cedar Lebanon's reforestation programme.

We were featured in Mojeh Magazine, a leading luxury and fashion publication based in the Gulf, in a conversation about craft, identity, and what it means to make objects rooted in a specific culture for a global audience. We talked about how marquetry and the other techniques we use in our studio are not just decorative choices but ways of carrying Arab material culture forward into new forms and new contexts. The conversation touched on why home, as an idea, travels with you wherever you go, and how the objects around you reflect who you are and where you come from.

Our work was included in a touring edition of Beirut: The Eras of Design, a landmark exhibition tracing the political, social, and cultural forces that shaped Lebanese design from the post-war period through to the present. The show examined how Lebanese designers have consistently produced work of international significance despite, and sometimes because of, the turbulence of the country's recent history. Being included was a recognition that our studio is part of a longer and deeper design story specific to Beirut and Lebanon.

We collaborated with Studio Lel, founded by Pakistani-British designer Zara Latif and known for its exploration of the ancient Gandharan artistic tradition that flourished along the Silk Road, to reimagine our signature Carapace table. The piece translated the Carapace form, originally defined by our tortoiseshell-inspired marquetry inlay, into an entirely new visual language using the rich colour palette and geometric references of Gandharan art. It was a collaboration built on genuine curiosity between two design voices rooted in distinct but geographically connected cultures.

At PAD Design Art in Paris, one of Europe's most prestigious fairs for design, art, and decorative arts, we presented the Gandhara Carapace table through Galerie BSL, the Paris-based gallery that represents our collectible work internationally. The piece was created in collaboration with Studio Lel, a design studio founded by Pakistani-British designer Zara Latif, and brought together our marquetry inlay vocabulary with Studio Lel's exploration of Gandharan art, the ancient artistic tradition that emerged at the crossroads of Central and South Asia. It was the first presentation of that collaboration to a European fine art audience.

We were featured in INFINITI's Makers Series, a content and storytelling platform created by the Japanese luxury car brand to celebrate craftspeople around the world who were pushing the boundaries of their disciplines. The series drew a parallel between INFINITI's own philosophy of precision engineering and the kind of careful, skilled making we practise in our studio. We spoke about what it means to keep traditional Arab craft techniques alive in a contemporary design context, and why precision and patience are values that connect making across very different fields.

At Design Miami 2022, the world's leading fair for collectible design, we collaborated with Kohler, the American plumbing and bath brand, to create a large-scale installation reimagining the traditional hammam, the communal bathhouse at the heart of Arab social life for centuries. The installation was built entirely from handcrafted ceramic tiles produced through Kohler's WasteLAB programme, which transforms manufacturing waste into new materials. It was both a cultural statement and a design experiment: an ancient ritual space rebuilt from the material discards of industrial production.

The Transcendence tiles, our handcrafted ceramic tile collection created in collaboration with Kohler's WasteLAB programme, were awarded the Sustainable Standout Silver award at KBIS 2023, one of North America's largest kitchen and bath industry shows held annually in Las Vegas. WasteLAB is Kohler's initiative to transform manufacturing waste into new raw material, and the Transcendence tiles were made entirely from reclaimed ceramic and stone offcuts from Kohler's own production processes. The award recognised both the design quality of the tiles and the approach to material, which treated sustainability not as a constraint but as a starting point for craft.

To mark our 20th anniversary as a studio, we presented a special collection at Downtown Design, Dubai's leading platform for contemporary design from the Middle East, Africa, and South Asia. The presentation brought together never-before-seen collectible pieces alongside some of our most recognised works, giving visitors a rare overview of two decades of craft practice. It was an opportunity to show not just what we make, but how our thinking about material, pattern, and cultural identity has evolved since we began.

We exhibited our accessories collection at Creative Nation 961 in Abu Dhabi, an initiative established under the patronage of the Lebanese Business Council to champion and promote Lebanese creative talent across the Gulf. The exhibition brought together designers, artists, and craftspeople from Lebanon, offering a platform for the country's creative community at a particularly difficult moment economically and politically. Our accessories line, a collection of handcrafted objects using marquetry, mother-of-pearl, and wood, represented what Lebanese design can look like when craft is taken seriously.

We were recognised at the AD Design Awards, presented by Architectural Digest Middle East, one of the region's most respected platforms for architecture, interiors, and product design. The award came as we marked our 20th year as a studio, two decades of work rooted in Beirut and dedicated to bringing Arab craft traditions, particularly marquetry, mother-of-pearl inlay, and hand-carving, into contemporary design. It was a moment to reflect on what it means to build a studio practice around techniques that are ancient but far from finished.

Our work was included in Beirut: The Eras of Design, a major exhibition held at CID Grand-Hornu in Belgium, a leading European centre for design culture, tracing the history and distinct identity of Lebanese design from the mid-twentieth century to today. Among the pieces we contributed was the Now and Zen Bar, a furniture work that had been standing in our Beirut studio on the day of the August 2020 port explosion. The bar carried the physical marks of that day, making it not only a design object but a document of one of Lebanon's most devastating events.

We contributed a work to Take Me Away to Better Days, a charity design and art auction held at the Sursock Museum, one of Beirut's most important cultural institutions, itself still recovering from damage caused by the 2020 port explosion. The auction brought together unique works by 28 Lebanese and international artists and designers, with all proceeds going to the Gaia Fadoulian Association, a Lebanese organisation working to protect and care for animals in need. Our contribution was a handcrafted piece made specifically for the occasion.

For Milan Design Week 2022, the annual gathering of the global design industry centred around the Salone del Mobile furniture fair, we continued our collaboration with Irthi Contemporary Craft Council, an Emirati institution dedicated to preserving traditional crafts. Building on the Zenobie vase work we had done together, we transformed the forms into Totem stools, freestanding pieces that wove together Emirati Talli metallic thread weaving and our signature marquetry inlay into a single unified object. The Totems were shown in Milan as an example of what happens when two distinct craft traditions are given equal weight in the design process.

Etat de Siege was a group exhibition at Galerie Tanit in Beirut, bringing together 20 Lebanese designers each invited to create a seat that traced the evolution of seating culture. We presented the Distort Arabesque Sofa, a piece that drew its form and proportions from the Arab diwan, the traditional low sofa found at the heart of Arab social and domestic life. The shape was deliberately distorted, stretched and compressed in ways that we felt reflected Lebanon's own shifting and complicated identity over decades of change.

At London Craft Week 2022, one of the world's leading celebrations of exceptional craft and design, we collaborated with The Invisible Collection, an online platform specialising in the work of established architects and designers, to dedicate a gallery space entirely to marquetry inlay. The installation traced the craft step by step, showing the materials, tools, and process behind our work for visitors unfamiliar with the technique. We also held a conversation on stage about cultural influences in design, specifically how Arab craft traditions translate into a contemporary studio practice based between Beirut and the wider world.

Ataya is an annual exhibition in Beirut that invites designers and artists to contribute works in support of humanitarian causes. We contributed a piece that quietly referenced the rose-coloured mansion overlooking Beirut, a landmark building long associated with the Lebanese capital's history and identity. It was a small, considered work: a nod to home and belonging at a moment when both felt fragile.

Following the Beirut port explosion of August 2020, which severely damaged our studio along with much of the surrounding neighbourhood, we gathered the fragments and debris left behind and remade them into objects. Wood offcuts, broken inlay pieces, and damaged materials were reconnected through craft, each piece becoming a record of what had happened and evidence of what was still possible. It was a deeply personal response to a collective tragedy, and the hashtag became a way of sharing that act of rebuilding with others.

We collaborated with Cosentino, the Spanish surface materials company known for their high-performance stone, porcelain, and quartz products, on a capsule collection exploring the possibilities of Dekton Slim, their ultra-thin large-format surface material. The project asked us to think about craft and decoration at a scale and in a material very different from our usual wood-based work. It was an exploration of where the boundary between surface, material, and design begins to dissolve.

At Design Miami/Podium x Shanghai, a satellite edition of the world's leading collectible design fair, we presented the Zenobie collection in collaboration with Irthi Contemporary Craft Council, an Emirati organisation dedicated to preserving and evolving traditional Emirati crafts. The collection brought together two distinct making traditions: Talli, the intricate metallic thread weaving practised by Emirati women for generations, and our signature marquetry inlay. The Zenobie vases became the meeting point for these two crafts, separated by geography but connected by a shared discipline of precision and pattern.

We designed a collection of desk sets and decorative trays for Exil Collective, a creative platform that brings together designers from the Lebanese diaspora. The pieces used geometric pattern and precise woodwork to create objects for the desk and home that carried the visual language of Arab craft in a quiet, understated way. What began as simple repeated forms revealed more depth the closer you looked, which was the point.

Migration of the Butterflies was a design experiment that took one of our most recognisable motifs, the mother-of-pearl butterfly, and applied it to an entirely new material: concrete. Where our butterfly inlays typically live in warm wood surfaces, here they were set into raw concrete panels, creating an unexpected dialogue between industrial material and delicate craft. The title referred both to the visual movement of the butterflies across the surface and to the broader idea of craft finding new habitats.

The Horizon Collection was a line of handcrafted leather accessories and objects inspired by the meeting point of land, water, and sky. Each piece was worked by hand in our Beirut studio, combining techniques including carving, embossing, and mother-of-pearl inlay applied directly onto leather surfaces. It was our first significant exploration of leather as a primary material, extending our craft language beyond wood into a surface that is softer, more personal, and more closely associated with the body.

Plug-Ins was a collection of cigar ashtrays made from wood and marble, each designed as a considered object in its own right rather than purely a functional accessory. The pieces drew on our geometric design vocabulary, with clean angular forms and precise joinery that gave each ashtray the weight and presence of a small sculpture. The collection was an argument that even the most everyday objects deserve the same attention to craft and material that we give to furniture.

We collaborated with The Flower Society, a Beirut-based floral design studio known for its conceptual approach to flowers and natural materials, to create three bespoke vase collections. Each collection was built around a different design concept, allowing us to explore how our craft vocabulary in wood and inlay could translate into objects made to hold living things. It was a natural conversation between two makers who share a belief in the considered object.

The Vitrine was a ground-floor boutique we opened in Beirut in the aftermath of the 2020 port explosion that devastated much of the city. We kept the physical damage visible, cracked walls and broken surfaces, while filling the space with the craft pieces we made in the months that followed. It was our way of saying that making things by hand is itself an act of recovery, and that home is not something you lose but something you rebuild through the objects around you.

For Roads for Life, a Lebanese non-profit working to reduce road accident fatalities, we created the Life Cabinet as part of their annual charity auction. The piece reimagined the medicine cabinet as a handcrafted object, with marquetry and inlay applied to a form usually defined by utility and urgency. The proceeds from the auction went directly to the organisation's road safety programmes in Lebanon.

We were commissioned by the Ministry of Presidential Affairs of the UAE to lead the renovation of the Arab League Hall in Cairo, one of the Arab world's most symbolically significant diplomatic spaces. The project involved redesigning key interior elements to reflect a contemporary vision of Arab identity, using craft techniques including marquetry, inlay, and hand-carved woodwork. It was an opportunity to bring our design language into a space where politics, history, and culture meet.

Back to Basics was a collection we released in early 2020, revisiting some of our best-known furniture and object designs in a reduced black and white palette. In a year that brought disruption globally and particularly in Lebanon, we felt compelled to strip away colour and decoration and return to the underlying forms that define our work. It was a meditative exercise, a reminder that the strength of a well-made object does not depend on ornamentation.

At Abu Dhabi Art 2019, one of the Gulf's leading fairs for modern and contemporary art, we presented the On Belonging collection through 81 Design, a platform dedicated to collectible Arab design. The collection included handcrafted pebble-shaped chairs and straw lamps, each piece inspired by the universal idea of home and what it means to belong somewhere. We were exploring how objects can communicate a sense of origin that transcends any single geography or culture.

We partnered with IKEA to create LJUV, a limited-edition collection of home accessories that brought contemporary Middle Eastern geometry into everyday life. Working within IKEA's framework for accessible, functional design, we developed pieces including trays, textiles, and decorative objects rooted in the geometric patterns and craftsmanship traditions of the Arab world. LJUV was designed for the moments when people gather, making considered design available to a much wider audience than our studio pieces typically reach.

MarquetryMania was a collection that pushed our signature marquetry and parquetry work to a more playful, experimental place. We applied linear geometric patterns to rounded, unexpected forms, combined bold colour pairings, and introduced mirrored surfaces to create reflections that multiplied and distorted the patterns. It was a deliberate departure from the refinement our work is usually associated with, a chance to ask what happens when craft gets to be less serious.

At Salone del Mobile in Milan, Italy's most prestigious furniture and design fair, Fratelli Rossetti, the historic Italian luxury shoe brand founded in 1953, presented a limited-edition boot featuring a heel co-designed with our studio. We brought our signature marquetry inlay technique to the heel, creating a decorative element that drew on Arab geometric craft traditions. It was a small but precise meeting point between Italian shoemaking heritage and our approach to surface and pattern.