“I am not trying to say anything. But at the same time, I am trying to say everything.”
Karen Chekerdjian’s trajectory into designing unfolds through experience rather than prescription. Her early work spans advertising, film, and graphic design, beginning in Beirut in the early 1990s, before moving to Milan in 1997 to pursue a master’s degree in industrial design at DOMUS Academy. There, under the guidance of Massimo Morozzi—founder of Archizoom—she entered a formative period that shaped her thinking as much as her practice. Working alongside Morozzi at EDRA, design became less about the object itself and more about the act of designing. As she came to understand it: design is not important. Designing is.
In Italy, Chekerdjian moved away from product-driven outcomes to explore form, function, and meaning as open questions. Rather than defining a style, she began developing a language—one that allows objects to remain ambiguous, to shift between use and contemplation, and to take on new roles depending on context and interpretation. Furniture, for her, can be something more than furniture: an invitation to look, to touch, or simply to coexist.
In 2001, Chekerdjian returned to Beirut, the contradictory and transient city where she was born and to which she constantly returns. That same year, she founded Karen Chekerdjian Studio as a space for reflection, experimentation, and making. At a time when design was still in its nascency in Lebanon, she chose to work with what already existed: local knowledge, handcraft, and culturally specific skills. Through long-term collaborations with artisans, processes of making became as integral to the work as the final form. Dialogue—between designer and craftsman, idea and material—remains central to her practice.
Across objects, furniture, spaces, and special commissions, Chekerdjian’s work resists finality. It invites ambiguity, embraces transformation, and remains grounded in gesture, interaction, and lived experience. Beginnings are rarely clear. Endings are never fixed. Meaning emerges over time, through use, memory, and encounter.
“I always believed that a piece of furniture can be something more than furniture. Why not push the ambiguity to the point where you cannot really decide if you want to use the piece or just look at it?It can be what you want it to be. It depends on how you want to see it, on your own story.”
The design and production teams
In 2001, Chekerdjian moved back to Beirut, the contradictory and transient city where she was born and to which she constantly returns. That same year she founded Karen Chekerdjian Studio, a space for her to continue actively reflecting and redefining her metier and method.
At the time, design was still in its nascency in Lebanon and the region at large. Rather than succumb to the challenges imposed by a lack of industry and technology, Karen harnessed an existing history to begin carving a foundation for design in Lebanon. Interested in culturally specific traditions and skills, she began working with local artisans, transforming the process of handcraft into distinct product design.
The dynamic dialogue between designer and craftsman still cultivates her work and, she insists, is necessary to its actualisation and re-visitation.
