I am creative. I cannot help it — it is how my mind works when my partner and 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 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, and I know it. But families will live with these objects for decades. Difficult now is kindness later.
My partner and the kids are the final test. I place prototypes where they will be used — not on a shelf for admiration. If he will not live with it, it fails. If one of the kids 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. The house is a brutal editor. We trust it.
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. We list them here because if our family needed this object, yours might too.
Creative as mother
People ask how I find time to design with 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 family for me. It is how my partner and I teach the kids that they can shape the world — not only consume it. They watch us reject a prototype and ask why. We 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.
