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Elevate 2018
Design Miami 2017
Jungle Protocol 2016
Naked 2014
Confessions 2012
Carlo & Mary-Lynn Massoud X Haas brothers
Mary-Lynn Massoud is a ceramist born in 1981. After graduating from manufacture de sevres in France, she opened her studio in Beirut. She then participated in a number of international exhibitions in Dubai (Dubai design days), London, Paris , the armory show New York, Basel Miami, guild South Africa, Nomad Monaco and Saint Moritz.
Carlo Massoud is a Lebanese product designer and interior designer. Having graduated from ALBA, the Lebanese Academy of Fine Arts in Beirut, he went on to pursue a Master in Product Design at ECAL, the School of Art and Design in Lausanne. Massoud constantly questions the social aspects of his environment, channeling these constructs into objects that often push the viewer to investigate their knowledge of the subject. His work possesses a versatile quality, which gives rise to the open-ended function of his objects. Massoud participated in many international fairs: The Armory Show (New York), Southern Guild (Cape Town), Design Day Dubai (UAE), Maison et Objet (Paris) among many.
The two siblings collaborated the first time in 2015.
Charles Kalpakian
Charles Kalpakian was born in Beirut in 1982. After collaborating with prestigious agencies including Christophe Pillet in 2011, he launched his design studio and has since then been developing his own projects and quickly collaborated with numerous French and Italian manufacturers.
The influences of his work take shape through the reinterpretation of motifs derived from the decorative arts. Charles’ line of work is always sharp yet flexible almost like the strokes created by a calligraphy brush. Ranging from product to interior design, his ventures always highlight the richness of his origins combined with the elements of Western modernity.
In 2012 his first Soloshow at Galerie BSL with "Cinetisme" wall cabinet collection allow him to make him known. He is represented by Galerie BSL in Paris and Joy Mardini design gallery in Beirut. Since then, he has also been working with many international brands, galleries and private clients. He collaborates and designs with talented craftsmen, from watches, furniture and sculptures for projects across the world. Later this year he designed the Paris & Milan showroom of italian lighting company Nemo. During the Salone del Mobile 2018 he collaborated with Gebruder Thonet Vienna at Wallpaper Handmade with the « Infinite wallbars ». He will be giving a design workshop at Tumo Foundation in Armenia. Several pieces and collaborations are in progress, in particular a large sculpture for LeMeridien Hotel in Riyad.
David Raffoul & Nicolas Moussallem
David Raffoul and Nicolas Moussallem have established a global presence since they set uptheir studio, david/nicolas, in Beirut in 2011. Their innovative approach to contrasting materials, along with their unique way of blending retro, contemporary and futuristic elements, gives their work a timeless aesthetic that translates to a wide range of projects, from furniture design to high-end bespoke interiors.
David and Nicolas met at the Lebanese Academy of Fine Arts, where they both studied for a Bachelor’s degree in Interior Design, going on to undertake Masters Degrees at the Scuola Politecnica Di Design in Milan. After graduating, both undertook internships with international design studios, Nicolas going on to freelance for a year in Beirut while David worked as a designer at Fabrica, in Treviso, Italy.
Since 2011, david/nicolas has staged several exhibitions and collaborated with established international brands. The duo’s “retro-futuristic” aesthetic is rooted in a wide range of influences, from Oriental geometry, to antique furniture, to robots, space travel and the music of Daft Punk. The partnership is built on mutual criticism, as much as encouragement.
David creates detailed sketches while Nicolas prefers to write down his ideas, and no design is ever completed without both partners’ input. While one is working on a design, the other will often “hack” it, vetoing a particular aspect or suggesting an addition that necessitates a fresh approach.
The duo’s breakout year came in 2014 at the Milan Design Week during which the New York Times selected them as one of the design week’s three breakout stars. Later the same year, they held their first solo show in Beirut, “Loulou/Hoda” at JM Design Gallery, exhibiting pieces inspired by their grandmothers that combined Oriental and Western as well as antique and contemporary influences. Subsequently, the studio introduced its first industrial project at Maison & Objet, the “Orquestra” tableware collection for Vista Alegre, which was awarded the Red Dot Design Award and the Wallpaper* Award.
From local Lebanese newspapers to international magazines, david/nicolas have not come short of making an appearance in their most prominent articles. The duo was selected by Wallpaper* Magazine for their POWER 200 as part of their pick of “20 designers under 40”, they were also highlighted among the 86 designers of the year 2015 by AD magazine in France.
david/nicolas work on multiple types of projects, from collaborations with considerable international brands, to the design of their own pieces, like the “Paume” collection, exhibited at Nilufar Gallery in 2015. Since 2016 they are represented by Carpenters Workshop Gallery, which exhibits their limited edition pieces such as the “Monocle” cabinet. They also work with individual clients on projects that capture their imaginations, whether that means refurbishing a classic car or designing a custom interior for a high-end restaurant. Their near obsessive attention to detail means that they leave nothing to chance – every last aspect of the interior is designed and produced by the studio.
Flavie Audi X Rogan Gregory
Flavie Audi (French/Lebanese) (b.1986) graduated from the Architectural Association in 2011 and completed an MA at the Royal College of Arts in 2014, where she specialized in glass. Her practice has expanded into various media and collaborative projects with fashion, jewellery and furniture designers. Her works has been widely exhibited in Europe and US (Venus Over Manhattan New York, David Gill London, Stedelijk Museum Breda, Galerie Tanit Munich, Karma International Zurich, Elisabetta Cipriani London).
Audi’s practice finds its point of departure within the manipulation of glass. Glass plays a crucial part, for the artist, in contemplating a speculative utopian future world where humans create cosmic fragments and new types of landscape formations. Using the physical properties of glass, Flavie highlights the duality between the real and virtual worlds. Through its omnipresence in nearly all contemporary forms of digital devices, glass becomes a signifier of the tension between the realms of the tangible and the digital, as well as a facilitator of the disappearance of physical objects.
The digital atmosphere that surrounds us threatens the definition and perception of reality. In an era of technological innovation that has seen the creation of flawless, synthetic diamonds, undetectable by man or machine, Audi’s questions how we experience the real. Audi creates fragments emanating from a mass production landscape where gemmology aligns with geology in this synthetic new nature.
Flavie pursues ways of expressing sensuality and luminosity creating dazzled encounters with wonder and the sublime. Her works translate the mechanism of life and light and resemble fragments of an ethereal landscape or geology. The forms and gestures found in it capture a fleeting, living energy and suggest a certain mystery, expressing the energy and essence of existence, a sense of life, hovering between digital screen and celestial body. In a dematerialised world where all is virtual and generic, her work seeks to define a new type of aesthetic and physical materiality and invites the mind to expand in the cosmological infinite.
Jana Aridi
Jana Aridi is a Lebanese architect and designer. She received her architecture degree from the American University of Beirut in 2013, and in 2017, she completed her Masters in Product Design from Domus Academy in Milan.
Jana has always been fascinated with the handmade, the customized and the personal. Her designs, much like her architecture, are thoughtful, straightforward and raw, always true to the material used and the story they want to tell.
She uses different forms of expression to give life to her projects from simple watercolors, to paintings in powerful acrylic. Most recently she immersed herself in the art of hand-carving wooden spoons. Her most recent work is a collaboration with architect Karim Nader at the Art of Dining, an event by AD Middle East, where she showcased a limited edition set of unique hand-carved wooden spoons that each represents a different shape and function.
Jana believes that design should enhance the human experience. Design has the power to change people’s lives, both functionally and emotionally. Her aim is to make people interact with her designs, to make them happy, and to even to make them dream.
That is the role that she tries to accomplish as a human being and designer.
Marie-Lyne Samaha & Anthony Daher
Marie-Lyne and Anthony Daher founded their architecture and design firm in 2012. Its focus is creating sustainable and ecological designs, while maintaining key elements of Lebanese heritage. Since its establishment in Amchit, the studio has carried out various construction, landscape and interior design projects, aimed at promoting the integration of classic Lebanese character and contemporary concepts.
Their latest work ‘Stouff’; a new take on the traditional Lebanese stove, won “Best Object Design” at Beirut design fair 2017.
Stouff’s modern design presents an energy efficient performance, engineered to maximize heating power output while minimizing wood consumption. Its versatility allows it to be connected to your home’s central heating system, while maintaining tribute to its traditional roots by featuring a special cooking compartment.
Nadine Hajjar
Nadine Hajjar is a Lebanese designer and wood artist based in Montreal, Canada. Trained in Beirut as an interior architect at the Lebanese American University, she decided to specialize in furniture and industrial design by enrolling in, and obtaining, a Master degree at the Domus Academy in Milan, Italy. To satisfy even more her thirst for creation and more crucially for production, she decided she wanted to be closer to the material itself. Wood. She studied cabinetmaking for 3 years in Montreal at the École d’Ébénisterie d’Art de Montréal.
Nadine founded Nadine Hajjar Studio in 2014, and since then, she has been developing her own collection of furniture, lighting and objects. It is only through carving wood and witnessing as objects take shape within her own hands that she felt complete as a designer and a sculptor.
Every object she brings to life tells a story. She infuses her work with lyricism and her definition of humor, making them bold and useful story books one can read in any direction through organic, clean and mostly, gentle lines and curves. While being experimental with a retro influence, her work imagines certain poetry.
Roula Salamoun
Roula Salamoun is an architect and designer, founder of EXTRAGROUND a Beirut based studio developing multidisciplinary projects. She earned her Bachelor of Architecture with distinction (American University of Beirut, 2007) and continued her graduate research in New York City (Columbia University, 2011), where she was awarded the William Kinne fellowship.
She has collaborated with Columbia University on a number of regional projects and has worked with Bernard Khoury / DW5 for over six years as a Project Manager and Architecture Manager before establishing her practice in 2017.
Her interest in multi-scalar design, experiential design and sustainable material experimentations is explored through projects ranging from architecture to experimental installations and products. Her work has been published and exhibited in Lebanon, Finland, Italy, Jordan, China and the United States.
Salim Al Kadi
Salim Al-Kadi is an architect based in Beirut. He is a graduate of the American University of Beirut (B.Eng/Arch. 2004) and Columbia University (M.Sc. 2006). Since 2011, Salim has been a senior lecturer at the American University of Beirut’s Department of Architecture and Graphic Design.
Since 2014 Salim has also been involved in SIGIL, a collective involving Khaled Malas, Alfred Tarazi and Jana Traboulsi. Together they have completed multiple projects including ‘excavating the sky: a project on Syria’ commissioned by and exhibited at the 2014 Venice Architecture Biennale, ‘current power in Syria’ exhibited at the 2016 Marrakech Art Biennale, ‘Monuments of the Everyday’ #therevolutionisamirror at the 2016 Oslo Architecture Triennale and “electric resistance - monument to a destroyed windmill” exhibited at the 2017 Sharjah Biennale in the Sursock Museum in Beirut.
In 2016, he founded the Beirut Architecture Office. A practicing architect, Salim believes that the responsibility of the architect is not to build confidence in the built environment but rather disrupt the apparent stasis by introducing necessary hesitation. This motivation was recently explored in his K29 Keffiyeh 001 project, where he designed the first Keffiyeh manufactured from bullet-resistant material. In 2017, Keffiyeh 001 was followed by a Keffiyeh 002 which was exhibited in New York at the Museum of Modern Art as part of “Items: Is Fashion Modern?” exhibit.
Sayar & Garibeh X Katie Stout
Stephanie Sayar & Charbel Garibeh are Lebanese-based designers that work together as a team to complete projects where each have individual opinions and personal touches combined together to create nostalgic and dreamy pieces. Their approach to design encompasses their combined vision of naïve and experimental design with a dash of humor using new materials and forms. The duo opened their studio Sayar & Garibeh, in Beirut, after developing their product design skills and exhibiting their work at a number of international fairs such as Miami, Milan, Paris, Beirut and Dubai. Their work has been selected in 2015 and 2016 as Best of Milan Design Week and highlighted as Best of Maison et Objet Paris in 2015. After having met over 12 years ago in college, the two later went on to complete Master’s degrees in Interior Architecture from the Lebanese University. It was only three years after graduation that they realized the necessity of designing together to produce the best work.
"Working together is always fun, and while communication is one of the main elements in our method, we can't hide the fact that it sometimes gets messy, but it's all part of the ride... We tried to work separately a few times [in the beginning] but we always ended up realizing that there was something missing."
Sibylle Tarazi
Sibylle Tarazi is a designer and aesthete based in Beirut, Lebanon.
Raised in Beirut, Paris and Rome, she graduated in Graphic design and Fine arts from the American University of Beirut in 2002 and with a Master’s degree in Accessories design specializing in jewellery from Milan’s Domus Academy in 2007.
Born to a family of archaeologists, designers and craftsmen specializing in Middle Eastern art, Sibylle was inevitably immersed in a stimulating historical and contemporary art milieu which clearly stands out in her art.
Conscious that fulfilling a role in tune with her background could play for or against her own artistic aspirations, she spent much of her life working towards distinguishing herself and developing her own unique style.
During her frequent travels to Europe, visiting ateliers, museums and galleries in search of inspiration she resolved to achieve a collection of pieces that would be dreamed of and coveted: “I knew I wanted to do something very special, very different, very exclusive, something that would create links between the past, present and future.”
Stephanie Moussallem
The Beirut born and based Lebanese designer Stéphanie Moussallem undertook her studies in interior architecture and graduated in July 2011 with a Master’s degree in product design, she was quickly noticed by the owner of one of the most prestigious design and production company in the middle-east. During the 4 years spent there, she built a great experience and knowledge in production, execution and luxurious detailing.
In 2015 she launches, Stéphanie Moussallem Design Studio bringing distinct high-end collectible furniture and product designs from Beirut to the World.
Stéphanie Moussallem, the creative behind the eponymous multidisciplinary interior, product and furniture design studio, believes her final products must be functional and enjoyable in addition to aesthetical.
When designing, she thinks like a user, working intimately with noble materials, testing new and sometimes forgotten Mediterranean artisanal techniques to evolve and even disrupt design archetypes. The end products are distinct, mostly handmade pieces with luxurious finishing and details.
Luxury for Moussallem, however, is not about decadence, but about practicality, quality and timelessness: “
Luxury in design is when a work is simple, elegant and ageless.
”
Stéphanie Moussallem Design Studio is testament to her design range, the Studio’s work has been exhibited at various design shows in Paris, Milan and Beirut, including: La Fiera di Milano, Salone Satellite, Varenna - Poliform Milano, Starch, SMO Gallery, House of Today, OTC Editions, Joy Mardini Design Gallery, Le BON MARCHE Rive Gauche - Paris, WallpaperSTORE* and many more.
Tamara Barrage
Tamara Barrage is a Lebanese artist/designer based in Beirut. After earning a master’s degree in Product Design from ALBA (Académie Libanaise des Beaux-Arts) in 2011, she pursued a second master’s degree from Design Academy Eindhoven in the Netherlands specializing in Contextual Design.
Upon her return to her hometown, in 2014, Tamara engaged in exploring the tactile and sensorial characteristics of various materials. Using an array of experimental techniques, Tamara aspires to better articulate how forms and textures provoke senses, manipulate emotions and articulate memories.
Her interest in materiality takes the form of multiple explorations into shapes that become materials or materials that turn into shapes. Often threatening while revealing an overwhelming sense of fragility her creations are creatures of another realm, somehow unfamiliar, somehow, if one looks closely enough, all too familiar.
Tamara participated in several renowned local international exhibitions including, Sharjah Biennale (Beirut), Maison et Objet (Paris), House of Today (Beirut), Athr gallery (Jeddah), Design Days Dubai (Dubai), Biennale Internationale de Design (St Etienne), Salone el Mobile (Milan)…
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