Designing Pieces With Suppliers

I am creative. I cannot help it — it is how my mind works when the children are asleep and the apartment is quiet except for the hum of Dubai at night. I see a gap in a room and I sketch the object that should fill it. Not always because I want to be a designer. Because I cannot find what I need, and my family deserves better than good enough.

From sketch to supplier

The process always starts the same way. A ritual fails because the object is wrong — a plastic cup beside marble tile, a lamp that glows cold blue, a tray that slides when keys land too hard. I draw in a notebook: proportions first, because Athina taught me proportion before ornament. I note materials. I note weight — will a child knock this over? I note light — where will Gulf sun hit it at 5pm in August?

Then I contact suppliers. Some I have worked with for years — stone cutters in Italy, metal workshops in Turkey, glass blowers who understand that Meli glass should borrow marble texture without pretending to be stone. I send sketches, photos, sometimes a voice note in Greek when my English fails me for the technical word. I ask for samples. I reject samples. I ask again.

Prototype until it is true

The first prototype is never right. The marble arm is too short for the sconce to graze plaster the way I imagined. The travertine base is too heavy for the bedside table. The wood dome is beautiful but the cord is ugly — so we redesign the cord path, hide it, make technology disappear. I am difficult, I know. But families will live with these objects for decades. Difficult now is kindness later.

My kids are my final test. I place prototypes where they will be used — not on a shelf for admiration. If one of them does not notice the lamp at dusk, it fails. If another avoids putting a water glass on a tray because it feels too precious, it fails. Children are brutal editors. I trust them.

Listing on Meli

When a piece survives the family test, it joins the edit on this website. Some pieces are mine alone — designed by me, made by partners I chose slowly. Others are collaborations: a supplier’s form refined through my sketches, my material choices, my insistence on honest finish. I list them here because if my family needed this object, yours might too.

Creative as mother

People ask how I find time to design with two children and a business and a body that needs wakeboarding and swimming to stay sane. The answer is: I do not find time. I steal it — dawn, naptime, the hour after bedtime when the sketchbook comes out and my mother calls from Athens to ask what I am drawing now.

Creativity is not separate from motherhood for me. It is how I teach my kids that they can shape the world — not only consume it. They watch me reject a prototype and ask why. I tell them: because we can make it truer. Because our family deserves objects that match our life.

That is designing for Meli. Not a brand exercise. A family practice — sketch, source, prototype, live with it, then offer it to yours.