“It is not a boutique,” the Lebanese painter and designer Gilbert Halaby says of his eclectic Rome atelier, where vintage belts, hand-painted silk sarongs, custom jewelry, and one-of-a-kind bags coexist with books by Arabic philosophers. “It is like a small salotto,” he adds—Italian for “living room.”
Maison Halaby is tucked away on the quaint Via di Monserrato, just steps away from the bustling Campo de’ Fiori. Other elegant boutiques, such as Chez Dede, Soledad Twombly’s L’Archivio di Monserrato, and Poltrone Couture, have also quietly sprung up in the area in recent years. “We don’t have the crowd,” Halaby says. “We don’t have the tourists, so if people want to come to you, they need to know.”
