It’s Monday, and Salem Charabi, the 34-year-old Danish-Egyptian architect and designer, is sitting on a bench in Paris. He’s wearing a puffer jacket and has wired headphones and a little bit of a tan. A small tree, still summertime green, stands behind him. Less than 24 hours ago, he’d flown in from Cairo, where, less than 24 hours before that, he’d put on an exhibition of new lighting designs titled “Behind the Moon Mountain” at his studio in Giza. His trip to—fittingly—the City of Light is an extension of that show, now on view at Design Miami.Paris, the European offshoot of the South Florida fair that many now feel is stronger (and certainly more intimate) than the original. Today, he launches his first book. He’s busy, to say the least.
“It all sounded very, very romantic a month in advance,” he tells me of his packed itinerary. “And it’s absolutely terrible when you’re in it.” Charabi is joking, of course; even in the traffic noise and fatigue of intercontinental travel and the logistics at hand, he carries—much like his creative output—a palpable serenity.