- Design
- Autumn/Winter 2026-27
- October
Triptych:
Jo Booabbood
Lebanese designer Jo Booabbood co-founded Doha-based Boo Design Studio in 2021 with his wife Amanda. The studio specialises in creating furniture, lifestyle objects and installations that reflect cultural stories and celebrate heritage, including bespoke projects for Fifa and Hermès. In everything they do, the creative duo continues to embrace joie de vivre, producing objects intended to inspire and delight – such as the MIA Music Box, a scale model of the Museum of Islamic Art that plays the Qatari national anthem. Boo Design Studio is part of the Design Doha Biennial 2026 and has won the prestigious AlUla Design Award twice. Here, Booabbood shares the inspiration behind the studio’s work.
The Brief
“Our inspiration most often begins with the project brief itself. Before we design anything, we research the subject in depth: its history, its context and the traditions surrounding it. For the 2022 Fifa World Cup in Qatar, for example, we were asked by Qatar Museums to design pieces to celebrate Arab culture for the VIP lounges in the football stadiums. We used resources from the Qatar National Library and the National Museum of Qatar, as they have a lot of cultural background on Qatari life. We explored how Arabs and Qataris traditionally decorated homes, tents and even animals, which led us to the tassel. It’s used everywhere, yet often overlooked. So we chose to make the tassel the centrepiece of our collection. We played on the form and then we gave it function, creating benches, lights, tables and furniture.”
Old Cartoons
“One constant reference for us is old cartoons, such as Japanese manga and Disney. This isn’t from nostalgia, but for how much they convey with so little. With a silhouette, colour or a gesture, cartoons project an entire character or world in seconds. It’s powerful to communicate a message through a small painting, or using two colours to show anger, for example. That economy of storytelling is exactly what we aim for in a space or an object. Cartoons taught us that exaggeration and simplification can make a form more memorable, not less sophisticated. This ethos of exaggeration and simplification can be seen in the work we did for the Hermès shopfront in Doha in 2024. Inspired by the brand’s flagship Paris store, we created a shop window featuring a horse made of tassels. It was very simple, very linear.”
Ettore Sottsass
“I find inspiration in everything and I don’t differentiate between my life and work. If I’m working on a project and need resources or inspiration, I tend to visit museums and galleries. I’m always drawn to those that tell a story. Seeing how a curator communicates these stories keeps pushing our own visual language forward. Sometimes it’s the story of a civilisation through objects, like at the Museum of Islamic Art or the National Museum of Qatar; other times it’s the story of a single designer’s mind, like Italian architect Ettore Sottsass. He changed the way people perceive design, deconstructing the product and transforming ornaments into geometric forms that were new for the era he lived in. His products make you smile. I feel as if we are always unconsciously inspired by Sottsass’s work.”
Cover image: Jo and Amanda Booabbood, co-founders of Boo Design Studio, pictured in their Doha studio. Photo: Julian Velasquez
