The Founder

Etienne Bastormagi

Etienne Bastormagi’s architecture is shaped by movement – between disciplines, scales, and cultural contexts. Resisting fixed categories, he works through shifts and contrasts across typologies: memory and material, weight and lightness, rawness and refinement. Whether carving light into concrete or drawing the city into an interior, his spaces and objects centre on creating new dialogues between place, pieces, and people.

Since founding his studio in Beirut, Bastormagi has drawn on studies in Architecture and Urban Design, as well as a decade leading concept development across large-scale projects. Alongside his practice, Bastormagi leads workshops and academic collaborations between Beirut and Milan, teaching at the American University of Beirut and contributing to institutions such as the Lebanese American University, the American University of Sharjah, the Architectural Association, and the TUMO Center for Creative Technologies.

Raised in Lebanon within a family of Armenian metalworkers, Bastormagi spent his early years learning through making. This foundation in material sensibility continues to echo throughout his work. Now based in the loft above his grandfather’s former stainless-steel factory, he continues to experiment with construction and memory, surface and scale, reworking brutalist codes with a sense of lightness and play.

He has led sessions and lectures at institutions including TUMO, the American University of Beirut, the American University of Sharjah, and the Architectural Association’s ‘Reconstructing Beirut’ initiative, and most recently led a workshop for FROMM as part of Milan Design Week (2025), contributing to the next generation of architects and designers through teaching, exchange, and cultural dialogue.

The Studio

Studio Etienne Bastormagi works across scales, with an office grounded in Beirut, Lebanon. The practice’s architecture moves fluidly from pieces – objects, memories, traces – and expands into places that speak of layered identities. Founder Etienne Bastormagi draws on his studies in Architecture and Urban Design, and a decade spent shaping concepts at different scales, to navigate varied typologies and terrains. The resulting work resists categorization and seeks connection, informed by Bastormagi’s Armenian diaspora heritage.

The studio embraces this duality, navigating scales with a sensitivity to transformation. Its design language reinterprets brutalist codes with a lightness of touch, balancing structure with whimsy – sharp edges meet unexpected curves, rigid forms bend toward movement. What emerges is a body of work that resists easy categorization: sculptural yet structural, poetic and rigorous, deeply rooted yet open to reinvention. Comfortable in the liminal, the practice draws together fragments – of place, material, and memory – into new spatial configurations.

Bastormagi’s contributions to architecture and design have been recognized internationally. The practice was named in AD100 Middle East (2024) and Architectural Digest’s Definitive List of Top Designers (2024), and was included in Dwell 24 (2022). The studio’s work has been a finalist at the World Architecture Festival and the Interior Design Awards. Featured in publications such as ArchDaily, Dezeen, Divisare, Domus, Elle Decoration, the Financial Times, Frame, IDEAT, and the New York Times, his projects engage a broad critical discourse.

  • Whether architecture, object, interior, or urban installation, projects begin in a state of unpredictability, opening space for new possibilities to challenge conventional boundaries. A kindergarten roof garden that extends green space into the heart of its community, a cast aluminum  mirror that folds light and shadow into a conversation with its surroundings, an apartment animated by stories woven through craft and play – each project is approached with an attuned sense of place and an ambition to reframe spatial possibilities.

    Bringing the outside in, casting memory as material, and sculpting with light and shadow, Bastormagi’s output is porous, continuously evolving through collaborations with artists, designers, and craftspeople. Across all scales, the studio is defined by the strength of its relationships – between materials and makers, spaces and their inhabitants, past and present. Its output is both object and environment – each space an intervention in the city, each object an architecture in its own right.

    • Adele Chebly

    • Ahmad Beydoun

    • Ahmed Amer

    • Aline Chahine

    • Assaad Feghali

    • Elie Saleh

    • Ismail Hutet

    • Kann Design

    • Local Industries

    • Lucile Abi Chebl

    • Meg Architects

    • Mira Hawa

    • Nada Borgi

    • Omar Dally

    • Reem Obeid

    • Reine Hage

    • Sarine Vosgueritchian

    • Samer Marouni

    • Sandra Richani

    • Studio Triniti

    • The Piecemakers

Press Features

Academic

  • Weaving with Light

    a workshop during Milan Design Week with Doha based brand FROMM

  • Workshops with students at TUMO yerevan in furnitecture, to design a central piece in an existing coffee shop

  • Lecturer at the American University of Beirut between 2016 - 2022

  • Invited for Design 8 studio teaching at the Lebanese American University in 2017 and 2020

  • Architectural Instructor at the University of the Holy Spirit Kaslik 2007 - 2015

  • Panelist at the AA on reconstructing Beirut, with the initiative of Let’s Play that is based on urban interventions in public spaces

  • American University of Sharjah workshop on furniture design

Exhibitions

  • Presenting the Behaviorology Collection as part of the LABO collective activities during the 2024 Milan Design Week

  • Selected for the curated section, the dressing room -2- was presented as part of the Brussels Collectible Fair in 2024

  • Presented a limited edition of the Behaviorology collection vases in cast aluminum that were curated as part of the M7 studio.

  • Works of the Minjara Collection developed for Minjara Editions were exhibited at the CID Museum as part of a collective exhibit on design in Lebanon.

  • Presented the Cast Poems 660.3 c, collection of lighting devices in cast aluminum for the LABO collective as part of the Fuori Salone Milan Fair 2023

  • Works of the Minjara Collection developed for Minjara Editions were exhibited at the Mudac Museum as part of a collective exhibit on design in Lebanon.

Awards & Nominations

  • Stellar Drawings Prize Finalist for works of representation by the studio

  • Finalist for a series of products at the Interior Design Awards

  • Finalist at the AlUla Design Awards for the best product category

  • Winner of the competition of the memorial architectural project