Loulou / Hoda david / nicolas

What you see before you is not uncommon. Being Lebanese, one would surely have warm memories consisting of one or more of these items, probably laced with the scent of strong perfume, or food. It would take us back to the home of our grandmother, a strange yet almost sacred place, filled with an assortment of old Western and Oriental furniture, local and traditional house ware, Turkish tiles, kitchen attics, and dusty rugs. Nothing ever matched, yet everything was always perfectly in place, and of course, there was always that one antique object or piece of furniture famous for having been handed down from one generation to the next, and which had miraculously survived time (and war) itself. If thoroughly deconstructed, a Lebanese grandmother's house will almost entirely consist of Western and/or Oriental furnishings; nothing was ever 100% Lebanese, yet through combinations and merging with other smaller traditional products, the outcome always went along with the Lebanese identity.