Spaces With Meaning: Mariem Darghouth on Designing for People, Culture, and Memory
BeART World JOURNAL's Series: Spaces With Meaning
For Mariem, a space becomes meaningful not only through beauty and function, but through the people who live in it — their habits, their memories, and the objects they choose to keep close.
Designing for a Person
What makes a space feel truly ours?
It is rarely one thing. Not the furniture alone, not the colour of the walls, not the light that arrives in the afternoon. A room can be beautifully arranged and still feel as though it belongs to someone else.
Mariem has built her design practice around this question. She is an interior designer with a strong interest in spaces that are elegant, comfortable, and timeless, and years of experience with furniture, fabrics, wallpapers, curtains, and upholstery. But when she talks about her work, she does not begin with materials. She begins with
people.
It starts, she says, with a good dose of empathy — being able to put herself in the client's place, listen carefully, and understand how they live and what makes them feel comfortable. That listening goes further than taste. It is not only about what people like visually, but about their habits, memories, culture, and personality. Through conversation and observation she tries to capture these small details and translate them into colours, materials, textures, furniture, and the overall atmosphere of a room.
What she is looking for is not a style. It is a person.
What drew her to the work in the first place was this same combination: transforming a space by bringing together beauty, function, and the needs of the people who live in it. Over the years her knowledge of textiles and materials has become essential to that, alongside close attention to colour, texture, and proportion — the things that quietly
decide how a room feels to be in. The most rewarding part of her profession, she says, is the chance to rethink a private or shared space around what the people who use it really need. And the reward at the end is a simple human one: seeing their satisfaction and happiness once the project comes to life.
“The goal is to create a space that reflects who they are, rather than simply following a design trend.”
Designing Across Cultures
Mariem lived in Tunis for a large part of her life, and the city shaped the way she sees design. There, you can move from the narrow streets of the Medina into colonial and post-colonial neighbourhoods, and pass through completely different architectural worlds that coexist in harmony. Growing up surrounded by those contrasts left her with a conviction she still works from: different styles, periods, and influences can live together and still feel natural. Her Mediterranean background also continues to shape the way she sees design. She appreciates craftsmanship, traditional details, natural materials, and pieces that have a story, and she likes to set them beside something more contemporary and simple.
Travelling extended the lesson. Discovering how other cultures create and experience their spaces keeps giving her new perspectives, and often suggests ideas she might not have considered otherwise. Being exposed to different ways of seeing beauty, comfort, and functionality has broadened her sense of what a welcoming room can be.
She is careful about how those influences are used. She likes bringing them together while always adapting them to the personality, lifestyle, and needs of the people who will live in the space. For Mariem, culture is not simply decoration. It becomes part of a space when it connects naturally with the person who lives there. And Tunis taught her something larger than architecture: that what truly gives a space life is not only its structure or its decoration, but the memories and experiences we create inside it.
“There is no single way to create a beautiful or welcoming space.”
Master bedroom
Designed by Mariem Darghouth
When Objects Carry a Story
Ask Mariem what turns a well-designed interior into one that feels truly personal, and the answer comes quickly: the things inside it, and where they have been. What gives a space real character, she says, is choosing materials, furniture or objects that have a story and a past. She describes an interior she would love to be able to walk someone through almost like a museum, telling the story behind each piece and why it was chosen. It is an unusual image for a designer to reach for — not a showroom, but something closer to a collection with a memory.
There is something very special, she adds, about being surrounded by objects that feel like personal treasures: pieces whose true value is not necessarily visible to everyone, but is deeply meaningful to the person who lives with them.
Art, craftsmanship and culturally meaningful objects matter to her for the same reason. They give a space its identity and soul. She is naturally drawn to pieces that show the hand of the artisan, carry a cultural reference, or have a story behind them. She likes to mix them with more contemporary pieces, and she is relaxed about whether they match. For her they do not need to share a style; they need to create a connection. A traditional piece of furniture, handmade tiles, a painting or a single object can belong in a modern interior if it brings character and feels naturally connected to the space.
The test she applies is not a visual one. She knows a piece belongs when it adds something beyond decoration — when it creates emotion, tells a story, or simply makes the room feel more unique and alive.
“I know a piece belongs when it adds something beyond decoration.”
Giving the Past a New Life
There is one part of her cultural heritage that holds particular meaning for Mariem: traditional Tunisian craftsmanship, especially the restoration of old furniture and traditional objects. She is drawn to pieces that carry the marks of time and the hands of the people who made them. Restoring them allows her to preserve their history while giving them a new purpose and a new place in contemporary interiors.
The work connects her to her roots, and reminds her that beauty does not always have to be new, or perfect. For her, restoration is more than repairing an object: it is a way of respecting its identity, preserving its memories, and allowing its story to continue.
Which is, in the end, how she thinks about rooms as well. A space becomes meaningful because of the stories we carry from it.
And now and then a project arrives in which a client gives her complete creative freedom and trusts her to bring her own vision to life. Those are the ones she treasures, because they let her explore ideas more freely and express her creativity. When that happens, she says, she simply lets the magic happen.
About Mariem Darghouth
Based in
Qatar 🇶🇦 Doha
Professional Social Media
Downtown Belvédère · 2026
Photography: Ahmed Ben ABDELGHAFFAR