Images d'Orient

Images d'Orient began in 2000 as a venture between a brother and a sister who had come back home to Lebanon. The founding impulse was preservation rather than commerce. Their argument was that everything was being modernised and disappearing into a new aesthetic, one in which their own roots were fading.

What came out of it is a design house paying tribute to the legacy of past civilisations and to Mediterranean heritage. It makes tableware and home pieces whose look the house describes as both vintage and futuristic. Ancient motifs are carried on modern forms rather than reproduced.

The brand ran for two decades before it had a shop of its own. The first boutique opened in Beirut in March 2019, which is an unusual order of events and tells you the design came first.

Today the collections reach more than fifty countries. People started to identify themselves in the designs, as the house puts it, and a label with a recognisable character was the result.