Wafa Al Falahi: Building Spaces That Think and Feel

Working across ceramics, interiors, furniture, and experimental materials, Emirati multidisciplinary designer believes that spaces are not meant to be passively experienced. In her eyes, they’re meant to be felt. With a background in interior design from the American University of Sharjah, she explores narrative, memory, and materiality through her practice, often through the lens of sustainability and cultural heritage. 

As a kid, being an only child proved to be a perk—it led her to spend hours creating, building, and exploring the different forms of making. That boundless curiosity about form and emotion steered her towards studying design and expanding into material research and fine art. “Growing up, I wanted to be many things and could never choose just one, so I became everything I wanted to be through my work,” Al Falahi tells Dazed MENA. Her motive is simple: to turn fleeting ideas into something tangible that you can see, feel, and fall into.

The designer’s mission is to reimagine how we live with – and within – the built world. “I want to shift the way we experience spaces from something purely functional to deeply emotional,” she explains. “Spaces should move us, not just serve us.” 

Every project begins with research and storytelling, the twin pillars of her practice. She then translates those narrative ideas into tangible forms, whether through drawings, paintings, or the distinct spatial language of her interior projects. “I would hope that my work becomes a brief second in someone’s day when they disconnect, pause, and are immersed in a different atmosphere.”

Parallel to her work designing F&B spaces through Sorbe Studios, her art practice gives tangible form to the subconscious. She employs unconventional materials like papier-mâché, pastel, and pigment to construct dreamlike compositions that trace the boundaries between human and animal, self and other.

This process-driven exploration has been refined through a number of prestigious residencies and fellowships, the Art Residency at Cultural Foundation Abu Dhabi and the Salama bint Hamdan Emerging Artists Fellowship (SEAF) at Salama bint Hamdan Al Nahyan Foundation included. Additionally, her ability to merge the technical with the hallucinatory has taken her work to Maison&Objet in Paris.

Al Falahi sees her evolution in scenography—the art of stage design is only a natural extension of her practice because it merges art, architecture, and atmosphere in real time. “I see it as a way to expand how people connect with space through scale, emotion, and experience,” she says.The immediate future includes preparing for her first solo exhibition in 2026, which expands on her recent series, Fever Dream. The show promises to further examine the dialogue between the internal and external self through layered compositions that capture moments sitting between clarity and distortion.