In a city where reinvention is less a trend than a survival instinct, Beirut-based design house Rat d’Hôtel is staging a quiet rebellion through an intriguing exhibition. Titled Fantastic Plastic, the event is running at Takeover Gallery until February 26, reframing one of the world’s most contested materials as something bold, tactile, and defiantly poetic.
“Make plastic fantastic again” reads less like a slogan and more like a dare. Rat d’Hôtel, founded by designer Anne-Lise Franjou, transforms recycled plastic into sculptural stools and candleholders that oscillate between function and statement. Fragile yet permanent, industrial yet artisanal, each piece embraces contradiction. What was once disposable becomes collectible; what was overlooked becomes luminous.
The collection is produced in collaboration with Plastc Lab, Lebanon’s first dedicated plastic recycling and design laboratory, which has diverted over 400 tonnes of waste from landfills. The stools follow a process both technical and unpredictable: plastic is collected, sorted, shredded, melted, and poured into custom moulds, resulting in one-of-a-kind surfaces marked by unexpected swirls and textures. No two are identical.
The candleholders, however, abandon the mould entirely. Their forms are improvised in real time as molten plastic is poured and shaped by hand. The result feels less engineered and more intuitive, bordering on performance. It is here that Rat d’Hôtel’s ethos becomes clearest: sustainability is not presented as moral obligation but as aesthetic experiment.
The exhibition itself is conceived as a living environment rather than a static display. Over the course of the run, new stool colours appear, subtly shifting the atmosphere. Candleholders will glow behind the gallery window, blurring the boundary between interior and street. A sound installation by Amer Chamaa layers recycled audio recordings from the fabrication process into looping compositions that fill the room, turning production into ambience and waste into rhythm.
Rat d’Hôtel’s name, borrowed from the French expression for a clever thief who slips between hotel rooms and identities, functions as metaphor. The studio moves between art and design, jewellery and furniture, object and experience. It resists mass production, favouring small runs crafted in Lebanon with recycled or locally sourced materials. Fluid, adaptive, slightly outside the expected, the brand positions itself as both insider and intruder within the design world.
The exhibition unfolds within Takeover’s “guest room” format, as founder Ieva Saudargaitė Douaihi offers the space with full autonomy. Known for its fast-paced, artist-led programming, Takeover operates as a para-institution, agile, experimental, and responsive to Beirut’s shifting cultural landscape. A second exhibition in collaboration with Creative Space Beirut will follow in March, extending the dialogue between design, fashion, and pedagogy.
At a time when plastic often symbolizes environmental collapse, Fantastic Plastic proposes another reading. Here, waste is neither hidden nor moralized. It is confronted, reshaped, and made visible. Rat d’Hôtel does not absolve plastic of its history; instead, it forces us to look at it differently. In Beirut, that act alone feels radical.
For more stories of art and culture from across the region, visit our dedicated archives and follow us on Instagram.
