Window-shopping the world may come just a smidge too easily thanks to the Internet, as I learned recently on losing my heart, if not my wallet, to Nada Debs.
A singularly striking brunette raised in Japan, educated at the Rhode Island School of Design, and more or less apprenticed in London, she has helmed Nada Debs Furniture & Design (nadadebs.com) since 2005, and her new Arabesque seating line looks every bit as lovely as its creator.
That line comprises both armchairs and sofas with curved walnut backs hand-carved in what the company’s promotional material calls “a traditional Islamic geometric pattern”—row upon row of interlocking circles whose merger produces secondary rows that resemble Tinkerbell’s pixie dust. The chairs and sofas alike also feature fabric seats in a laudably restrained quintet of colors, as well as variants with Eisenhower-era angled legs (the amusingly named Arabesque Moderne look).
Fab, yes? One wee complication: Nada Debs Furniture & Design inhabits the central district of Beirut. Yes, that Beirut: Ms. Debs’ global peregrinations aside, she hails from Lebanon. As a result, she likely oughtn’t ever fret about this particular Midwesterner materializing in her showroom to woo her over one of those walnut wonders.
Still, in the interests of learning more about the Arabesque line, I emailed Nada Debs Furniture & Design regarding the availability of that seating through some retailer in the AT HOME area.
“Unfortunately we don’t have this product in the States,” replied the company’s Sami Azkoul with laudable promptness. Helpfully, Ms. Azkoul added, “You can order it directly from us, as we do deliver around the world.”
The mere thought of shipping-and-handling charges on a walnut armchair dispatched from Beirut, Lebanon, to my St. Louis bungalow, frankly, made me sit down, hard. It seemed such a pretty whimsy, while it lasted. Still—pardon the verb here—cushioning my disappointment was the realization that even Ms. Debs’ elegant Arabesque likely would have fast suffered the same fate as almost every other furnishing in my bungalow: burial under stacks of books, magazines, and other oddments.
