As I sit down to speak with Nada Debs, a storm is brewing outside, and a bird – a white-eared bulbul – has sought shelter inside her studio and showroom in Dubai’s Alserkal Avenue. Rather than panic about it disrupting our interview or causing havoc among the many intricate, valuable objects around us, Debs seems enchanted by its presence – as am I. Her enchantment quickly turns to concern for its well-being. Throughout our conversation, we keep one eye on the bird, wondering whether it is all right and whether it needs help finding its way back outside.
In between answering my questions, Debs asks plenty of her own. It becomes clear very quickly that beyond hard work, craft and creativity, her greatest strength may be her attentiveness – an ability to truly take in the world around her.
It makes sense, then, that her work is best appreciated when you understand the life behind it. To look at a Nada Debs design is to see something that is ordered and calm. There is often a Japanese restraint to the line, an Arab richness to the surface and a sense that several worlds have somehow been persuaded to coexist. It is furniture and object design as a kind of autobiography – or perhaps, even a kind of diplomacy.
That idea of duality – of living between places, cultures and visual languages – runs through everything Debs does. Born into a Syrian family that moved to Japan in 1917 after seeing opportunity in the textile business, she was raised in Kobe, educated between Beirut and the US, then professionally shaped in London before returning to Lebanon. Debs has spent much of her life assembling a coherent identity from those apparently opposing parts.
“There was this drive to belong, because there was no one I could belong to,” Debs explains, showing me a photograph of herself as a young child in Kobe – the only foreign student in her class.
She opened her first Beirut store in late 2003, but the story began slightly earlier, and with a degree of serendipity. She moved to Lebanon from London at what she describes as a difficult point in her life.
“I was asking myself: ‘What am I doing in the Arab world?’ I never wanted to live in the Arab world,” Debs tells me, with disarming honesty. “I had a complex about being Arab and Muslim.”
Then came the commission that changed everything. A member of the Jordanian royal family, who had seen Debs’s children’s furniture in London, got in touch. “She said: ‘I’m pregnant and I want to have a kid’s room done by you.’” It would launch Debs into a whole new world as a designer.
At the time, the designer had been making highly crafted children’s furniture, using traditional British marquetry techniques, but she was applying them to nurseries rather than to drawing rooms. “Because I had my own kids and I wanted to make furniture for them,” Debs says simply.
It is an early indication of the way she works: with a respect for tradition, but never piety. She is interested in taking something established and twisting it into something playful, contemporary and new.
But arriving in Beirut forced a larger question: why stop there? “And from then on, I asked myself: ‘Why am I only doing children’s furniture?’” That question would eventually lead her to Damascus, where she began working with craftspeople trained in traditional marquetry, mother-of-pearl inlay and carving.
What interested Debs was not preservation for preservation’s sake. She was not interested in reproducing inherited Arab interiors exactly as she found them.
“This was my first piece I ever made,” she says, pointing to an early design. “And all I did was I told them to make me something very geometric, circles, squares, triangles. It’s a basic bedside table, but at that time, it was revolutionary.
“What I did is I started to take this traditional stuff and clean up the lines because that’s what the Japanese way is,” she says. “You remove and remove and remove, and you end up with this.”
That process of subtraction and refinement became the essence of her work. “For me, it was natural to simplify lines and keep it pure,” she says. “But it wasn’t natural for the people I was talking to. It’s like betraying their own craft.”
She explains that persuading artisans to see this as evolution rather than erasure often took time. But that instinct – to strip back ornament without stripping away meaning – is precisely what made Debs one of the first designers from the region to articulate what a contemporary Arab design language might actually look like.
“I was representing a modern Arab identity that didn’t exist before,” she says. It became so resonant that it eventually led to her being commissioned for the renovation of the Arab League Hall in Cairo.
It helped, perhaps, that Debs never approached Arab craft with unquestioning reverence. She came to it as both insider and outsider. Japan, more than Lebanon, remains her philosophical anchor. “Japan seems to be the essence. It’s what holds me together,” she says. “Their philosophy of life is so real. It’s very spiritual and connects to the essence of things.”
That sensibility has shaped not only her work, but also her worldview. “I am always about connection because I’m Japanese. I mean, I grew up there and I’m Arab, but I’m always searching for that connection between opposites,” she says.
If Beirut gave Debs a design vocabulary, Dubai appears to have given her a second act. Her move to the UAE came in the aftermath of the 2020 Beirut port explosion, which devastated both the city and the studio space she had so carefully built. Yet in Debs’s telling, it was also the shock that pushed her out of a kind of creative and commercial comfort zone.
“I was too comfortable in Beirut,” she says. “It wasn’t challenging any more.” That is not said with any lack of affection for Lebanon. Quite the opposite. But there is a striking honesty in the way Debs speaks about the limits of operating there. Beirut, she suggests, had become too familiar, too forgiving, too small for what the brand might become.
Hearing that feels surprising. From the outside, Debs always seemed like the ultimate Beirut-based Lebanese design success story – a figure whose reputation already travelled far beyond the city. It is revealing to hear that she did not experience it quite that way.
“Here, I’m competing now with much bigger brands,” she says of the UAE. “So this was my challenge in Dubai. How would I compete on a wider scale?”
The answer, in part, has been visibility. In Dubai, Debs became newly legible to global luxury brands seeking a designer who could embody regional craft in a contemporary form. She has collaborated with the likes of Dior and Louis Vuitton, alongside projects with government institutions and private clients across the region.
What Debs offers is exactly what many global brands are now trying to tap into. “They’re coming to us for exactly what we’re representing, which is the craft of the region,” she says.
Still, Debs is refreshingly unsentimental about the realities of that work. She speaks movingly about artisans and their devotion to process – “they just love the craft itself, the act of it” – but she is also blunt about the structural challenges of building a business around endangered handcrafts in the Arab world.
“I would have liked to create a craft industry in Lebanon,” she says. “But I don’t think that’s feasible.” That tension now sits at the centre of the business, not least because her son has joined the company.
Where Debs is driven by instinct, craft and cultural meaning, he brings scale, systems and spreadsheets. “Finance. Of course,” she says with a laugh, when I ask what world he comes from. “Numbers are not what drove me.”
Between them sits the central question of the next chapter: how do you grow a craft-led business without hollowing out the very thing that made it valuable in the first place? “That’s our biggest debate,” she says.
Preserving the ethos of Nada Debs the person, while growing Nada Debs the brand, may be the challenge of the next two decades.
The brand has strong foundations to build on. What has always made Debs’s work resonate is that it is not merely decorative, or “heritage-inspired”, or any of the other slightly oversimplified phrases used to flatten regional design into shorthand. Her work has a tension within it. It contains migration, ambivalence, adaptation, loss and pleasure.
Now, more than 20 years after opening her first store, Debs is thinking less in terms of objects and more in terms of legacy. She wants to expand further into interiors and architecture.
“Just making objects is not enough. Let’s say I make this table, but it’s in a room that I don’t like,” the designer says with a tut. You get the sense that Debs is easily bored by sameness – and that she is always on the lookout for the next challenge.
During our photo shoot at her beautiful Dubai home – where she made sure we had a steady stream of snacks and Uzbek tea – Debs showed us brooches made from mother-of-pearl in the shape of emojis. She seemed genuinely delighted by them, a flicker of mischief in her eye. Dedicating her years of talent to something that’s just a bit of fun seems to animate her as much as the grand commissions.
She also talks, tellingly, about Hermes – not necessarily as a stylistic reference, but as a model for longevity. A family business. A craft house that evolved without losing itself. “Maybe I can leave a legacy,” she says.
For a designer whose entire career has been built around connecting disparate worlds, it feels like a fitting ambition. Not simply to make beautiful things, but to leave behind a system, a language and a point of view sturdy enough to outlast her.
And perhaps that is what a Nada Debs object really is: not simply a table, a cabinet or a box, but proof that contradiction can be turned into coherence – and that identity, if you work at it long enough, can become form.
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