THE COLLECTIVE
A Beirut studio gives craft tradition a contemporary voice.
By Alex Aubry
Photos by Sebastian Böttcher
“I think Li Edelkoort’s manifesto on the future of design perfectly sums up what we stand for today and where we see Bokja in the future,” says Maria Hibri, referring to the influential Dutch trend forecaster. Hibri is sitting in the living room of her eclectic home in Beirut with Huda Baroudi, with whom she founded the design studio Bokja 25 years ago.
The pair first met Edelkoort at Design Miami in 2008, when she stopped to see their furniture installation for Majed Al Sabah’s Alef Gallery. “We immediately clicked, and she purchased a daybed from us,” recalls Baroudi. A year later, Edelkoort included it in an exhibition in Milan, alongside the work of celebrated designers such as Marcel Wanders, the Campana brothers, and Philippe Starck. “It was the kind of validation we hadn’t received until then. That we could be considered designers in our own right,” says Hibri, who steers the conversation back to Edelkoort’s now-famous 2015 manifesto, ‘Anti-Fashion’.
Far from the image of the solitary star designer, the Dutch forecaster instead spoke of a future populated by networks of creatives and makers, as well as design collectives working together for positive change—a movement that is increasingly led by women. “She put into words what we’ve always tried to articulate through Bokja,” says Hibri.
An hour later, as the pair walk through the winding streets of Batrakieh, a neighbourhood where Ottoman and French-mandate buildings jostle for space with residential high-rises, they stop in front of an old palace not far from Hibri’s home. “This is where Bokja’s story began,” she says. An upholsterer had set up shop on the top floor of the abandoned building, which piqued Hibri’s interest. She had recently teamed up with Baroudi to launch Bokja, to explore their shared passion for furniture, textiles, art, and design. They named the studio after the traditional embroidered cloth used to store a bride’s dowry. The former palace, they realised, would be the perfect location for their workshop. “It’s a place that provided so much inspiration, with its weathered walls that had stories to tell, as well as our first team of upholsterers and embroiderers, many of whom are still with us today,” Baroudi says.
Bokja is a team of talented artisans and designers, representing diverse textile practices. The studio’s signature is its assemblage aesthetic, bringing together textile fragments. Primavera, top, an embroidered chair from the Flora and Fauna collection.
The palace was Bokja’s home for 11 years, until export orders arriving from Paris, Tokyo, New York, and San Francisco compelled them to seek larger premises. Before relocating, they registered the palace as a historic building to ensure its preservation. “It was our parting gift and a thank you to a place that had given us so much,” Hibri says. They chose Basta, a neighbourhood of mechanics, antique dealers, and second-hand stores, as the location for their growing brand over a modern factory on the city’s edge.
“At its heart Bokja is a reflection of Beirut, one that embraces its beauty and imperfections, as well as the many layers of cultures and civilisations that made this city what it is today,” says Baroudi.
Over the years, Basta gave back to them in unexpected ways. She gestures to a balcony where a neighbour’s sheets are drying in the sun. Multicoloured stripes and faded florals appear in off-kilter combinations that might inspire one of Bokja’s embroidered cushions. Then there are the nondescript storehouses lining the streets of Basta that supplied Bokja with an unexpected cache of mid-century furniture by Charles and Ray Eames, Florence Knoll, and Pierre Paulin. “At the start of the Lebanese Civil War in the mid-1970s, many foreigners left Beirut, storing their furniture in these depots where they remained forgotten,” says Baroudi. With their team of artisans, they began reupholstering modernist couches and chairs with assemblages of vintage embroidered textiles they had collected. It would prove a winning formula—a counterpoint to the trend for minimalism.
Baroudi and Hibri have travelled the world to source unique textiles, but the passion was ignited in Uzbekistan. Baroudi made her first trip there in 1998, where she explored the bazaars of Samarkand and Bukhara. She found beautifully preserved suzanis—hand-embroidered textile panels that are passed down from one generation of women to another—as well as vintage Kyrgyz fabrics with their distinctive colours and motifs. “They were surprisingly sturdy and perfect for upholstery,” Baroudi says. Together they made several trips to Uzbekistan to source fabrics. “We were mesmerised by those textiles, which haunted and inspired us,” Hibri adds. They began combining them with fabrics from other cultures, and with their own designs, creating a unique textile language—the brand’s signature assemblage aesthetic.
While Hibri and Baroudi began by collecting textiles and reupholstering the vintage furniture they found in antique shops and flea markets, they have since transformed Bokja into a multidisciplinary design studio creating furniture, objects, fashion, and art, each with a story. It has evolved into a laboratory of ideas and a collective of skilled artisans. “We insist on calling ourselves a collective because Bokja is more than just the two of us. It’s a community of craftsmen and designers that form a creative ecosystem,” Hibri says.
Inspired by a Mahmoud Darwish poem, Hands Off My Zaatar is a tapestry and a tribute. Food lives in our rituals and our gatherings; to cook, share, remember, and reclaim is an act of resilience.
She is standing in Bokja’s ground-floor workshop in Basta, where some of those craftsmen are hunched over hundred-year-old Aghabani sewing machines. “We specialise in hand-guided embroidery using these old machines. It requires a lot of upper-body strength, which is why it has traditionally been practiced by men,” says Baroudi. Many of the artisans—from Syria, Jordan, Sudan, Iraq, Kurdistan, Egypt, and Palestine—found stability and a means to support their families through the brand.
“Without them, we couldn’t have built Bokja,” says Hibri. This culture of sharing and collaboration is reflected, she says, in each piece that leaves their atelier. Taking the stairs up to the research and design studio, we stop by a room where a group of women is seated at a table creating mood boards populated by images, drawings, and scraps of colourful, embroidered textile. For the founders, it represents not only their collaborative way of working, but also the future of their design collective.
“Our mission has always been to support and empower women, whether by partnering with an NGO in Tripoli or mothers in Palestinian refugee camps. We find ways to bring their voices and stories to the world by exhibiting their embroideries in art galleries and museums,” says Baroudi, pointing out that many of the young women in the room are part of a new programme to train Bokja’s next generation of designers and artisans.
“We’ve been thinking a lot about our legacy, Bokja’s next iteration, when we’re no longer here,” says Hibri. They are, she says, creating an institution and a school to pass on the knowledge of its artisans and to share its archive with a larger audience. They also continue to collaborate with women creatives across the region. Among them is Azza Fahmy, the celebrated Egyptian jewellery designer in whom they found a kindred spirit. Fahmy commissioned Bokja to create intricate tapestry walls that celebrate Egypt’s rich heritage for her new stores in Riyadh, London, and the Grand Egyptian Museum. The embroidered panels feature Pharaonic motifs sourced during visits to Egypt and from Fahmy’s personal archive. They seem to come to life with three-dimensional constellations of stars, lotus blossoms, and ibises in flight. “We learnt a lot from Azza. She’s a gentle and observant presence, but also a force of nature,” Baroudi says.
Maria Hibri, top, and Huda Baroudi, above, photographed in their homes in Beirut.
Minutes later, seated in a corner of their busy studio, Hibri pulls out a photograph of herself and Baroudi taken in New York, 20 years ago. “We realised early on that for Bokja to succeed in the Middle East we needed international recognition, and we were determined to get into ABC Carpet & Home,” recalls Baroudi, of the iconic New York furniture and homeware emporium. In 2004, armed with little more than a catalogue of images and a belief in their artisans, they made their way to the store’s grand building at the corner of Broadway and 19th Street. “Looking back, we were so naïve to show up at the store and ask to see Paulette Cole [ABC’s owner and head buyer],” says Hibri.
Asked to leave their catalogue, they heard back from Cole, who requested 20 pieces for a test-run at the store. Three days after going on display, the actress Kate Hudson bought four of Bokja’s chairs. It would be the first of several high-profile purchases—by Salma Hayek, Sandra Bullock, Ethan Hawk, Julia Roberts, and Christian Louboutin. It also marked the beginning of a relationship with ABC (every six months, a container is shipped to the store from Beirut).
“We’ve also had the privilege of collaborating with some formidable women in the Gulf,” Hibri adds. Bokja has taken part in exhibitions across the region, where the brand has a loyal following. “We’re touched by the support we’ve gotten from the Arab world, who wanted us to continue to exist each time a crisis hit Lebanon,” says Baroudi, noting that they would receive orders and invitations to show in the UAE, Kuwait, Bahrain, Oman, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar, with the proceeds going towards humanitarian causes.
For Hibri, this devotion for Bokja is linked to the brand’s core values. “There was a moment when we thought about scaling up the business, but it would have meant losing the soul of what we do. Bokja is ultimately a medium through which we can share our stories with the world.”
