One studio. One point of accountability.

Illesha Design was founded in 2025 in Dubai by Camille Hallacq and Shahid Mehmood — two practitioners who met at the intersection of two disciplines rarely housed under one roof: fine art consultancy and interior craftsmanship.

Between them, they bring over a decade of international experience gained within leading art consultancy and interior design agencies across Europe and the Middle East. Camille’s background is rooted in art curation, spatial storytelling and design direction; Shahid’s in the logistics, handling and installation of fine art and valuable objects at the highest level.

Founding Illesha Design was their answer to a gap they had each encountered repeatedly from opposite sides of the same industry: studios that conceive beautiful spaces often hand off the art to someone else; specialists who handle art expertly are rarely involved in shaping the space around it. Illesha Design exists to close that gap — one studio, one point of accountability, and one continuous thread of intent from the first sketch to the final fitting.

The name reflects the studio’s own bridging of cultures and languages — English, French and Arabic all appear across its identity — a fitting mark for a practice built between Europe and the Gulf, serving clients across both.

Most interior studios begin with a floor plan and add art at the end, as decoration. Illesha Design inverts that order. Every project starts as a curatorial exercise: what story does this space need to tell, what culture and materiality should it carry, and what artworks or objects would embody that story authentically? Only once that narrative is set does the spatial design — the furniture, the finishes, the architecture of the room — get built to support it.

This is what the studio means by “curated spaces”: interiors where nothing is arbitrary. Every material is chosen with intent, every object has a reason for being where it is, and every artwork is in conversation with the room around it rather than simply placed inside it.

The result is work that sits at the intersection of art and space — interiors with meaning, guided by curatorial thinking and storytelling, designed to be timeless and bespoke rather than trend-driven.

Since founding in 2025, Illesha Design has delivered full-service art and interior programmes for some of the world’s most recognised hospitality and private-client names, collaborating with interior architects including Sybille de Margerie and Hugo Toro — the latter named Best Interior Designer of the Year 2025 by AD Interiors for the Orient Express project the studio curated and installed.

Across these projects, the studio has sourced, curated and installed 1,998 bespoke artworks and 5,808 decorative objects and books — each one chosen, produced and placed with the same rigour.