Manal approaches a space the way a traveler approaches an unfamiliar city: with total curiosity, no assumptions, and a hunger to understand how everything connects.
Over nearly two decades, she has delivered some of the most celebrated hospitality environments in the world: CLAP London, SUCRE London, CLAP Ibiza, Babylon DIFC, and KIRA at Marsa Al Arab, among others. She has worked alongside an extraordinary range of design voices — Lázaro Rosa-Violán in Spain, Studio Glitt and Wise Labo in Japan, Hugo Toro in France, Verhaal in South Africa, First Within in the UK — absorbing their approaches, their vocabularies, their philosophies about how people inhabit space. She has worked closely alongside Dolce & Gabbana in CLAP Ibiza, as well as consulted high-end design names across the world. She has walked through palaces and penthouses, luxury restaurants and cultural institutions, across Lebanon, Qatar, the UAE, the UK, Italy, Switzerland, Norway, Iceland, Canada, and beyond.
All of that travel has a point. Viscerally, Manal believes that every country, every city, every culture shapes the physical world around it in ways that are entirely its own. The materials people choose. The light they let in. The way a room decides whether strangers will talk to each other. These things are not arbitrary. They are the accumulated decisions of a people. She collects them.
Back at the drawing table, those observations become something rare: spaces that feel specific, alive, and deeply considered. Where others see a budget constraint, Manal sees a sourcing challenge. She is known, with some reverence, as someone who can produce a stunning aesthetic experience for a fraction of what it would otherwise appear to cost. Her command of materials, fabrication, and global supply chains is the kind of expertise that takes twenty years to build and is almost impossible to replicate.
She has built her career in a field, and in a region, where authority was not freely given to women. She earned it anyway, project by project, detail by detail, working alongside senior figures in hospitality design execution across the Middle East and Europe.
At Elysium, Manal brings something no specification sheet can capture: the eye of someone who has actually lived inside the question of what makes a place feel like home. She is here to translate that — into materials, into textures, into moments — and to prove, once again, that beauty and resourcefulness are not opposites.
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