Nada Debs Celebrates 20 Years of her Brand with Her First Participation at Downtown Design

Revered Lebanese designer Nada Debs, known for her design objects featuring a unique blend of oriental and Arab motifs is showcasing her eponymous brand for the first time in Downtown Design, offering once again an exciting showcase for regional and international designers. For Debs, who recently set up her second base in Dubai and who divides her time between the Gulf megapolis and Beirut, participating at Downtown Design offers her the opportunity to present her brand to a new cohort of collectors, buyers, procurement teams and design enthusiasts.



“Our participation marks the brand’s first proper step into Dubai,” says Debs. “We want to use Dubai as a base to celebrate our 20 years. It’s a city that has supported me since I began.”

Debs’ design label is a high-end luxury brand featuring highly crafted furniture. “We are also a lifestyle brand that is socially conscious, sustainable in the way that our approach creates a timeless, quality product that stands the test of time,” she adds. “We work mainly in customized furniture”, providing her clients, mainly interior architects and architects, with specially crafted, one-of-a-kind pieces.



Debs is also celebrating 20 years of her design company, which she launched in 2001. At the time, she had lived in Beirut for just one year, having grown up in Japan with her family and attending the Rhode Island School of Design. After she graduated, she moved to London and there began making furniture for herself.

Her designing took a turn after her first son was born and she began to make a children’s furniture line that caught the eye of friends who then asked her to make furniture for them. She did and in doing so she was lured back to her Lebanese homeland and Beirut. She found local Lebanese craftspeople to produce marquetry in colour. Her pieces were a success with friends, and she began her own business fusing local Levant craft, particularly from Lebanon with the minimalist, purist lines that she grew up with in Japan.



Twenty years later and Debs has a successful international brand and is celebrating its anniversary at Downtown Design. Her first participation at Downtown Design also marks the designer’s second base in Dubai, where she moved in 2021. Debs’ participation at Downtown Design, the Middle East’s foremost fair for regional and international designers, offers the brand an opportunity to explain to buyers, collectors, and dealers what it does.



The booth that she has devised for the fair presents her brand’s emphasis on hand-crafted design and human comfort. “We want people to be at ease when they come to our stand,” she says. “We aimed for a salon-type of feeling featuring earthy colours and urban, organic materials.” The stand will feature a sage green colour and include blocks to separate different objects. It will present two kinds of cabinets and a few seating arrangements, including her ‘Zen’ sofa, the brand’s ‘cane embroidery’ cabinet unit, a console made from organic material and the brand’s classic pebble table made with different marble tops and side tables from Debs’ new Organic collection.

Also on view will be accessory items such as Debs’ much-loved candles, trays, and boxes, among other pieces. “The collections we are presenting highlight 20 years of the brand’s various patterns and textures, featuring earth tones, unexpected dualities between natural materials and high-end craft,” explains Debs. “It presents a contrast of noble and down-to-earth items, and we hope that it will offer visitors an understated luxury feel.”