Mawad is a wood supplier. Their name means “matter.” For their relocating nearby the Beirut port, they wanted to celebrate life and the possibility of renewal.

On august 4th 2020, a blast of unconceivable proportions devastated the Beirut port and the surrounding areas of the city leaving human victims and rubble on kilometers of radius. The previous tenant of the shop on this very nearby location to the devastated port was a Lebanese furniture designer. From his initial very minimal design, remained the inside-out raw grey local basalt floor and the simple white walls which we were all eventually kept.

To celebrate the renewability and aliveness of wood as a material, we sought to plant an olive tree on the sidewalk with four benches all around, to sit and discuss and also to remind the prospective clients of the necessity of replanting forests. Internally, a ghost-like steel structure, like the scaffolding of a building under reconstruction at the image of Beirut itself serves as the ‘absent’ monochromatic support for making the wood samples float within an ethereal structure of white mesh, of perforated and expanded metal.

A central staircase in half spiral in the middle of the space on axis with the tree outside serves as transition and viewing point towards the various veins and varieties of wood that are suspended on this two-level setup with ground floor and mezzanine like a library where old books are once again trees. On the ceiling, to assert this statement in one more way, a neon sign says, in pure white: THE ART OF MATTER.