A 19th Century Ottoman villa, the house is located on Rue Gouraud in Beirut’s Gemmayze district, one of the city’s most traditional neighborhoods.

The renovation of the villa presented an opportunity to work with the past in a way that was contemporary and free of the pastiche afflicting many similar projects.

At the house, walls were opened in order to streamline the warren of rooms, tame the wild garden, and punch out the featureless wall at the rear of the living area to accommodate a majestic trio of -23foot-tall arched windows that open onto a stone terrace. Now the interior is flooded with sunlight from east and west.
The traditional hand-carved screens known as musharrabiyeh inspired the fretwork details of the steel designed bookcases. Nothing is just decorative, every piece of
furniture has a reason for being.

One salon is furnished with Vietnamese furniture whose mother-of-pearl inlay is a fresh alternative to the inlaid Syrian chairs and tables that are a regional hallmark. The austere luxury and rigid shape of the Vietnamese furniture is sharply contradicted on the opposite side of the house where the luscious, laid-back curves of the pastel- colored armchairs and the lacy laser cut of the bookshelf details create a more playful atmosphere.

The shimmering lacquer surface of the orange and yellow dining table is another contemporary update of a centuries- old Arabic design element; the reflecting pool that is often found in Middle Eastern homes. It acts as a central pivot around which the various spaces of the house are organized. The music room, which has its original hand-painted Art Nouveau ceiling, is a favorite place for relaxing. With original time floor intact and well supplied with a variety of seats for both sitting and relaxing, swathed in velvets and damask and sprinkled with Levantine elements, the music room is the epitome of opulence.

In the garden room, the floral patterns on the tiled floor lead the eyes and feet towards the greenery outside.

Lighting in most Lebanese houses is usually an afterthought. But in the design process of the interior of the villa, light is considered as a component of architecture and was incorporated and designed from outset of the project.

Carefully woven into the fabric of a traditional Lebanese house, these knitted lamps perfectly illuminate the timelessness of the house, modern in shape and form, casting lattice-like patterns of light and shadow.

The luminous punctuation underlines the imposing vertical sweep of the rooms and adds to their majesty. The central hall becomes a living space in its own right acting as the transition between the two sitting rooms: the one which opens onto the garden, and the other which opens to the street.