For Milan Design Week 2025, Saudi designer Nebras AlJoaib unveiled The Reading Room, a bold yet intimate installation created for L’Appartamento by Artemest. Set inside a historic Milanese apartment, the space blends sculptural forms, luxurious materials, and mid-century references—layered with Arab heritage and Italian craft. It’s a quiet revolution in how we think about reading spaces: no desk, no rigid layout, just conversation, texture, and storytelling.
Nebras, who founded her namesake studio in 2015, has built a reputation for her thoughtful approach to interiors—merging historical references with contemporary codes, and always leaving room for the unexpected. In The Reading Room, she brings together brass, marble, and bold geometry to create a space that feels both rooted and radically new.
KHAMSA caught up with Nebras after the debut to talk about her creative process, her trip to Tuscany to study marble at its source, and how designing furniture helps her tell more complete stories through space. From Saudi to Milan, this is a conversation about place, perspective, and the power of slowing down.
All images are courtesy of Nebras AlJoaib.
1. In The Reading Room, you reimagine a traditionally private, studious space as something more communal and fluid—what does that shift say about how you envision storytelling and human connection through design?
For me, storytelling is never linear, it’s layered and shared. I wanted to dissolve the boundary between solitude and gathering. A place for thought and exchange. Design, to me, holds the power to translate interior worlds into shared experiences — where form holds memory, and furniture becomes an invitation to connect.
2. You’ve described your visit to Tuscany’s marble quarries as transformative—what moment or detail from that trip still lingers in your creative process today?
The silence. There’s something deeply humbling about standing in front of a marble wall that has existed for years. In that stillness, I felt the weight of time, of presence. That moment taught me to listen and to approach design not as a forceful intervention, but as a dialogue. I often return to that instinct often in my work.
3. The Sling Chair is a stunning intersection of Italian craftsmanship and your own design ethos. How did that collaboration with Artemest challenge or expand your perspective as a furniture designer?
It reminded me that restraint is a kind of generosity. Italian artisans have a reverence for material and form that I deeply admire — nothing is wasted, nothing overcompensates. Designing The Sling Chair was an exercise in clarity: how can something be both strong and soft, sculptural yet human?
4. Your aesthetic often plays with scale and contrast—what’s your process for knowing when something is ‘just bold enough’ versus overwhelming the space?
Intuition with a lot of measuring! Every accent must carry weight, not noise. I often step away from a piece and return with fresh eyes: Does it hold the room, or consume it? Boldness, to me, is not about size — it’s about presence.
5. There’s a strong sense of rooted identity in your work, yet it always feels fresh and global. How do you navigate that balance between cultural specificity and universal appeal?
I start from personal stories, silhouettes, symbols that shaped me — and then I abstract.
I never aim to “represent” my Arab culture; I aim to translate emotion through form. That’s what makes it universal.
6. What part of classical architecture—be it a column, a niche, or a molding—do you find yourself most drawn to reinterpret, and why?
I am drawn the in-between spaces. Arches, niches, softened corners. They’re transitional by nature, symbolic of passage, of memory. They hold light differently and I reinterpret these forms in my work, not as ornament, but as structures that carries atmosphere. They remind us that architecture at its core is about framing human experience.
7. If The Reading Room were a character in a novel, who would it be and what would they be reading?
She would be a woman of quiet strength — observant, composed, but with a complex interior world.
