Award-winning social enterprise, 2B Design brings life back to Lebanon’s dying heritage
Down a Jeitawi side street in Beirut,
a traditional Lebanese home houses
a small atelier. Past an old iron gate, a
garden is filled with the peeling wooden
shutters, decorative iron tables and old
balconies of Lebanese heritage buildings,
giving a hint to what lies within. The
atelier belongs to 2B Design, an awardwinning
Lebanese social enterprise with
a mission to “restore the unseen beauty
of the broken.”
Based in Beirut for years, French native,
Benedicte de Vanssay de Blavous
Moubarak, saw Lebanon’s old heritage
houses being destroyed around her;
the decorative iron pieces that once
stood grandly, or the former railings of
mountain villages melted down and sent
to scrap yards. In 2004, she decided to
do something about it and set up the
furniture and home decoration social
enterprise, 2B Design.
The enterprise works to save
architectural salvage from destroyed
18th, 19th and early 20th century houses
and revive them into contemporary
home design creations. Combining
Moubarak’s long career working on
social-angled projects, 2B Design places
social-responsibility at its core. They have
a long-standing collaboration with the
Lebanese social organization, Arc En Ciel,
whose team of skilled disabled craftsmen
works on rejuvenating the pieces. The
enterprise also works with women from
marginalized backgrounds, training them
to hone their artisan skills to make an
income to support their families.
They have also built strong collaborations
with social-leaning enterprises from
a New England-based homeless
charity, Pine Street Inn and Habitat for
Humanity, an NGO which helps with
home refurbishment for its employees,
to Tahaddi who fight against poverty,
including the Dom (gypsy) community of
the Hay el Gharbi slums of West Beirut,
and Dream InDeed, an organization that
strengthens local social entrepreneur
projects.
2B Design’s flagship brand named “Beyt,”
a nod to the symbolic meaning of home
in both Arabic and Hebrew, highlights
the enterprise’s focus on promoting the
inclusion of people from diverse religious,
ethnic and cultural backgrounds, a kind
of small-scale protest against what
is often a divided sectarian region.
“We show that diversity can be an
element of beauty, unity and strength
and is an important factor in building
lasting peace,” says 2B Design’s mission
statement. “We also work on building
bridges and promoting understanding at
[a] grass roots level between [Arabs] and
Americans.”
“The philosophy of 2B Design is to give worth to the past and keep it alive”
“Benedicte wanted to combine both
sides – salvage all these architectural
items and at the same time try to do
something different and actually employ
people that are in need and marginalized
in society,” says Katia Boueri a recent
addition to the 2B Design team. The
atelier itself is filled with decorative iron
lamp bases with a modern touch, juniper
wood candle holders re-salvaged from
aristocratic mansions and delicate iron
tables. “We source them from all over the
country, from the north and south, Basta
and scrap yards,” Boueri says. “Most of
the pieces are in a very bad state. Some
of them still have bullet holes in them.
We try to keep them as they are, to leave
the character and scars.”
Once the 2B Design team has salvaged
the raw material, Moubarak, now based
in the States where the organization has
recently opened a store in Cambridge,
Massachusetts, works on the designs
from photographs. The drawings are
then sent to the team of blacksmiths
at Arc En Ciel, where the salvaged
wood of old doors on window shutters
might be added to the pieces. Once
the basic design has been completed,
they’re returned to the atelier, where
every morning Nada and Rania work
on the finishing – scrubbing down the
iron and removing the years of paint
layers, and doing patina work, in natural
pigments. Below the atelier is a dark
basement filled with finished stock
which is shipped to the US once every
few months to the enterprise’s largest
customer-base. The final products can be
found in several outlets, from US-based
furniture design fairs to furniture stores
across Europe.
While Beirut’s heritage buildings are
quickly disappearing from the urban
landscape, the philosophy of 2B Design
is to give worth to the past and keep it
alive. Within a modern-day throwaway
culture, the value 2B Design places on
the discarded pieces of the past and
recycle-philosophy stands out. “Through
our pieces you can actually see what the
houses used to be like. They’re destroying
Beirut, but we’re trying to keep the past
alive through new designs. This is the
way to not forget,” Boueri says.
In January, 2B Design became the
first Lebanese company to receive B
Corp certification from bcorporation.
net, joining 900 other social and
environmentally minded international
businesses. And, after receiving a
USD15,000 grant from USAID earlier in
2014 to buy raw materials, 2B Design
hopes to further expand and be able to
employ more people from marginalized
communities and extend their reach.
2B Design’s presence in the US is
spreading the narratives of Lebanon
and the region, helping to break down
stigmatizations of the Middle East and
build a deeper emotional connection
between the two countries.
2B Design Atelier
(01 572217, www.2bdesign.biz)
Shereh el KazenB
Jeitawi
Beirut