Design maverick Zain Mustafa speaks

Design is not there to judge. It can be a platform to hide your insecurities or help you put up a glamorous front. Design is there to make you feel better about yourself. It can become a part of your evolution too.

You can have someone design an environment for you so you can entertain guests. Or you can ask someone to design your home to represent a state of calmness that is absent in your life. For instance, you may want your home to give you a sense of order when you are in the middle of a personal crisis. Design can do that for you.

We create avenues for experiences, not spaces.
Space is everywhere. My room is space. The gap between my eyes, between my thoughts and between web pages is space. I am engaged in these spaces. If I design your house and you move through that space, you experience it. But I don’t create that space. No one does.

Architects who create buildings – think they create space. They don’t. They only create experiences by responding to space. Buildings, once ready, with their views, ventilation and light, create their own story. We merely respond to it.

Balance isn’t about balancing [what is on the] left with [that on the] right.
Balance, especially in design, is to put unexpected things together, almost bordering on disharmony. It is a fine line between chaos and order. My floor is a turf instead of a carpet. It reminds me of how nice it would be to do work outdoors. My extremely comfortable piece of furniture is camouflaged against my wall, save for its white outline. Together, these elements fall into place, creating balance.

When I am asked to design a site, my knee-jerk reaction is: let’s see it first.
I need to smell it, sense it… I find it hard to work with a bunch of drawings of concrete blocks. While they help me understand space, they don’t provide the guidance design demands. I need to visit the site to be able to create an experience for you. I need to talk to you to learn a little about your life. Only then will a coherent picture emerge of two scents – one of you and the other of your space. Together, these help me design.

Why Dubai? I wanted to try something radically different.
After completing my studies at Boston University, Parsons School of Design (NYC) and Columbia University, I embarked on a professional adventure that covered academia, fashion design, art installations, publishing, corporate communications, web design and interior design in Europe, Asia and North America.

Then in 2003, I came here from New York for an installation, en route to Tokyo. I didn’t like Tokyo. It was hectic, yet not engaging enough for me to stay. It felt a bit like New York and I thought if I stayed on, it would turn into the same comfort zone I had left behind.

So I returned to Dubai. I didn’t know anyone or what I was going to do, but the energy of the place was invigorating. The trajectory of my life has had the same essence: to take up opportunities that are exciting and challenging. Take it on, I told myself. I have no regrets thus far.

My winning majlis design was radically incongruous.
We were sure that we had misinterpreted the brief at the INDEX 2009, the Middle East’s largest contemporary interiors trade show. Still, we created the contemporary majlis with conviction and passion to raise the bar and generate a new direction for design – inside out. I was inspired by the bisymmetrical Islamic mashrabiya motif and its geometry when  I designed it. We never expected  to win!

My life is a symbiosis of sorts.
Take my relationship with the time I spend in the gym. Yes it keeps me healthy, but it also takes  me to a different place that isn’t about the body, muscle or about cardio. It is the time I spend meditating and connecting with my self. I can say the same about my relationship with my cats.  My earlier pet, Chewbacca, was with me 13 years. (It passed away last summer.) My current pet has travelled with me from Karachi to New York and Mexico. So my relationship with my cat is what makes it symbiotic for me.  The same can be said for  design where several layers  work simultaneously because they support each other.

The absence of a father has influenced my life.
My father was a fighter pilot who passed away on the job when I was barely two months
old. He was a legend; I’ve grown up in his shadow. My mother never remarried. She is a strong woman – sensitive, caring and gentle. Raising a boy (and only child) as a 20-year-old single mother in Pakistan in the  early 1970s couldn’t have been easy. I watched her struggle, and I learnt to be a fighter from her. In some way, who I am is
because I was raised without a father who would have taught me ‘boy’ things… like learning to shave. I didn’t know to do so properly until I was 24.