It was perhaps inevitable that Tessa Sakhi would be drawn to Venice. The mercurial lagoon city chimes perfectly with her polymathic creative practice: an architect specialising in “interior renovations and rehabilitations”, she is also a talented multidisciplinary designer and founded the AD100 studio T Sakhi in 2016 with her sister Tara. The siblings’ cosmopolitan heritage and cross-cultural upbringing also seems apt for a place that was founded on trading goods and ideas. Their father is Lebanese with family between Beirut and Accra, while their mother is half Polish, half Syrian. Tessa grew up in Beirut and Paris and is now based between London (where her partner lives), Beirut and Venice.
“I find a lot of resemblance with Lebanon architecturally because of its Ottoman and Byzantine influences, such as the triple arches that you find in homes,” says Sakhi of Venice, where she primarily resides. “I love the Italian culture, the craftsmanship and the scale of the city.”
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There’s plenty of inspiration to be had from the balcony of Sakhi’s canalside apartment in a residential part of Dorsoduro, where tourists are few and a genuine sense of neighbourly conviviality prevails. Sakhi points out that Venice is effectively an island with a famously small permanent population that swells throughout the year with incomers. While the creative community was welcoming, winning the trust of Venetian glassmakers – and asking them to innovate – as a twentysomething woman took time and patience.
“At first, they were very sceptical about what I wanted to do. They saw me as this girl, and then that I’m not Italian, and I’m not from Murano either,” Sakhi continues. “They’re used to doing the same thing – exactly the same thing – so, when I came up with my ideas of integrating recycled metals and developing new textures with Murano glass, they found it difficult to accept. I needed their expertise and their know-how, but they also needed my outside-of-the-box thinking. Bringing together minds from completely different backgrounds makes a project even stronger in the end.” The end result was presented at the inaugural Design Doha biennial last year.
The fruits of these ongoing collaborations can be seen dotted around Sakhi’s apartment. Although she describes its furnishings as “very eclectic, with different moods and eras”, the way she has combined vintage and new design with her own work feels very calm and cohesive. “I believe that you literally feel the sense of who I am here. I can tell you the story behind every item in my home. I buy pieces that I fall in love with, not because they’re valuable. They may cost very little, but they have a lot of value to me. And I think when you’re true to yourself, you feel the soul of the person within the house, and that’s what’s important. Every person that comes here says, ‘It’s so you’.”
This is not Tessa Sakhi’s first home in Venice; she lived in another tiny but charming apartment on the same street for two years, which she still leases and uses for guests, and happened upon this much larger, sympathetically renovated unit quite by accident. “Whenever I walked my dogs along the canal I would catch a glimpse of this place, but because it’s so elevated, I couldn’t see inside. Then, one day the idea came into my mind to see if there were any apartments to rent in this area. I wasn’t seriously looking, but this perfect apartment was available and I knew I had to take it.”
Living in this canalside apartment in Venice has proven to be mesmerisingly peaceful. “You can sit here and your mind just wanders off while watching the boats. As a creative person, that’s quite helpful. It’s very important, in the technological world we live in today where everything just moves so fast, to have this level of calm.” Unusually, Sakhi also has access to a verdant garden, which offers another tranquil escape and reminds her of a childhood spent in the mountains of Lebanon. She has an eponymous perfume line inspired by forest scents, and adds items she finds on research hikes, such as porcupine quills, to her collections of curiosities. Practical objects with ornate decoration also particularly interest this magpie – vintage cigarette cases, knives from the Lebanese town of Jezzine, antique walking sticks.
In the living area, a Sakhi-designed sideboard features traditional hand-carvings by Ivorian artisans, applied in a contemporary way. On top sit an ornate mirror and a surreal-looking 1970s clock in brass and aluminium by the artist David Marshall, which “feels alive”, adding to the vitality of the mix. Sakhi insists that the juxtapositions in her decorative vignettes come about subconsciously – through happenstance and what she is innately drawn to – rather than by a studied process. “I started my career renovating traditional houses and figuring out how to make them suitable for a contemporary way of living, so there’s always this mix between modern and traditional and old and new in my projects,” she explains.
In the hallway, a 1960s Egyptian armchair in iron and brass could be mistaken for an ancient throne, and is paired with paintings from Sakhi’s Cloud series, African sculptures and Venetian glass vessels. They all feel quite precious and are exquisitely crafted. “Within all these pieces, you feel the craft. You feel it’s all done by hand.”
Most of the artworks in the apartment are from West Africa. “There’s a mix of Ivory Coast, Ghana, Togo and Benin,” says Sakhi, who did a road trip for six weeks from December 2023 with the gallerist and curator Nicolas Bellavance-Lecompte, as he was researching the Interlude Rwanda show. “I tried to meet the artists alone to give them the space to explain their work and see if it resonated with me,” she adds. A particularly striking canvas by Ghanaian painter Daniel Tetteh Nartey has been casually tacked above her sofa.
The study is more classically Italian in feel, with an early 18th-century Madonna painting and a daybed dressed in Rubelli silks and plush velvet cushions. Above the latter hangs one of Sakhi’s mirror-glass pieces. She treats the surface as a canvas, experimenting with pigments at different stages of the firing process. Like many of her creations, it’s functional but also artistic, and elevates recycled materials to new heights of sophistication and desirability.
Next up is a series of mirrors inspired by the ever-shifting lagoon, but the tide is also pulling this peripatetic creative back towards Lebanon. “I think at some point we went through the shame of being Arab. I used to say that I’m Polish more than Lebanese. Today, I fully assume my Arab roots. I love my Arab roots. I think there’s so much culture, depth and truth there.”
