Liza Asseily – whose first restaurant launched in Paris in 2005 – brought her distinctive culinary style to Beirut in 2013 when she opened Liza, at the city’s Metropolitan Club. To create the restaurant’s statement interiors, Asseily drew on an eclectic host of creatives, from architects to artists; the results are both original and modern but also rooted in the aesthetics of Lebanon, her home country.
For Beirut Design Week, she teamed up with the curator Maria Ousseimi who designed Liza’s interiors. Together they gathered a selection of contributors – including the Milan-based wallpaper and fabric designer Idarica Gazzoni and architect Karim Bekdache – to her Paris and Beirut ventures, asking them to produce pieces inspired by her restaurants (and also the traditional colloquialism, ’The Lebanese make elephants fly...’). The result is a quirky curation of plates, bags and serving vessels that all tap into the spaces’ much-loved interiors – particularly the leafy Mediterranean atmosphere of the Beirut iteration.
