Hamza Mekdad: Engineering Kindness Through Space and Branding

Based between Beirut and Dubai, Hamza Mekdad has spent the past decade rewiring how the region feels, moves, and behaves inside a room. Long before he launched his multidisciplinary studio Hammerspace earlier this year, the Lebanese creative director was already responsible for shaping the atmosphere of some of the region’s most instrumental cultural spaces, from the kinetic scenography of nightlife destination The Garten to the sensorial worlds built for entertainment collective Factory People.

His work doesn’t sit neatly on a moodboard; it unfurls like a system. Mechanical sculptures inspired by ancient scientific devices, branding steeped in micro-mythologies, installations that reference Islamic miniature art, and spatial layouts inspired by Roman ruins that direct crowds without ever announcing themselves. Everything he makes belongs to a single universe, one constructed together by curiosity, craft, and a near-obsessive attention to emotional rhythm.

His years leading the creative direction at The Garten and later Factory People became the backbone of his spatial language: architectural enough to sway a room, intuitive enough to alter how people behave inside it. Hammerspace, he says, is more than a professional milestone. It’s the first time Mekdad allowed all the versions of himself – designer, artist, tinkerer, world-builder – to coexist under one identity.

“I used to be ashamed of wanting to practise every kind of design,” he admits. Being seen as a ‘jack of all trades’ felt like a liability in a landscape that prefers its creatives neatly categorised, but the studio changed the equation. “Creativity only inspires more creativity and, now, I’m not ashamed to claim it anymore.”

Hammerspace may be a studio on paper, but in practice, it behaves like something closer to a laboratory. It pulls from an invisible toolkit of memories, scientific oddities, and regional histories, turning them into spaces that feel as if they’ve always existed, just waiting for someone to open the door. “I believe that magic happens at the intersection of arts, craft, and science.”

Interestingly, Mekdad grew up in a home where craft was both survival and habit. His mother embroidered sheets, engraved glassware, and knitted winter clothes by hand. That environment, where imagination always came with technique, shaped him long before he ever understood it as design. And somewhere between those homemade objects and a teenage obsession with Leonardo da Vinci, a designer was forming, one with instincts wired toward experimentation and a kind of productive obsession.

His work has always been entangled with the sociopolitical realities of where he lives and creates. But years of navigating these conversations publicly pushed him toward a humbler, more deliberate stance: when everything is political, not every moment is his to fill. There are times when adding another visual, yet another interpretation, only hazes the message that needs to be heard.

Earlier in his career, Mekdad’s instinct was to respond—to create and comment in real time. Over the years, however, he has learnt the ethics of restraint. “Respecting my craft also means knowing when not to speak, when to let someone else’s message take priority instead of making viral content myself,” he explains. Still, a stacked calendar persists as the creative director takes on his most personal project yet: the first physical home for Hammerspace, opening in Beirut in 2026.