Omar Chakil

Omar El Wakil, known as Omar Chakil, has spent several years developing work at the intersection of art, design, and craft. A former singer and songwriter, later an image consultant and interior decorator, he works with an intuitive, sensory approach shaped by a personal relationship to material and memory. Of Egyptian, Lebanese, and French heritage, he builds bridges between cultures, eras, and forms.

After briefly studying design at the Domus Academy in Milan, he chose a self-taught path, shaped instead by hands-on experience. For nearly two decades, he designed private interiors around the world, developing a marked taste for raw materials and objects carrying meaning — an immersion that opened the way to a new chapter, devoted to one-off pieces and limited-edition furniture.

It was in this context that he began working with Egyptian alabaster, an ancestral material long associated with funerary art and sacred objects. In Chakil's hands, the stone becomes the vehicle for a contemporary language, blending organic lines, ancient symbols, and intuitive geometries — an aesthetic of contrast, between the strength of the monolith and the delicacy of detail, between the archaic and the avant-garde.

His first series of works, carved directly from raw blocks of Egyptian alabaster, was presented at Beirut Design Week in 2018. The collection went on to travel to France, Italy, Saudi Arabia, and the United States, and his work has since become a reference point in collectible design, drawing growing interest from architects, galleries, and collectors around the world.

Galerie Gastou first presented Chakil's work at PAD Paris in April 2025, in a space conceived with architect Matthieu Poirier-Lauvin around the clean, monumental language of ancient Egyptian architecture. The presentation brought together unique and limited-edition pieces — among them the Nubia shelving unit, the Résurrection coffee table, and the Sobek bench — carved from raw Egyptian alabaster, onyx, and marble.