SPARK

Midnight on Kfertay

Midnight fell on Lebanon on May 2nd 2025. Perched atop a mountain in the village of Kfertay is a long, rectangular brick house. Through its heavy, wrought iron windows, one can make out the rows of cherry trees belonging to the orchard that flanks its sides. On this night, the house stood still and unoccupied, just as it does ten months of every year. Memories of large gatherings, steaming coffee, and bowls of ripe cherries that once reverberated through the home’s hand-laid walls had since departed with their possessors to different corners of the world. Over the years, some memories drifted to Beirut, while others took root in homes scattered across America. In these homes, coffee and fresh cherries were still served on special occasions, a token of appreciation for those who came to know the house in Kfertay.

Since the early 1900s, the home has been a tether to Lebanon in the hearts and minds of four generations of the Maalouf family. In 1992, Fadi Maalouf inherited the home from his uncle Abboud and aunt Genevieve, and picked up the mantle of its stewardship. Every year since, sometimes alone and sometimes with family, he leaves his home in Michigan for a month-long stay in Kfertay. Upon arrival, Fadi always opens the windows and moves the chairs onto the outdoor porch. That way, his neighbors know to come over for breakfast and coffee.

But on this night, the windows were shuttered. Nearly 6000 miles away at a gallery in Brooklyn, Fadi and his son Bechara were preparing to host a different kind of gathering. Fadi stood outside, thoughtfully preparing a batch of shish tawook on the grill. Inside, Bechara was balanced carefully on a ladder, affixing a small, rectangular metal object to the wall; a new home for his memories.

Bechara’s Desk
Photo by Tony Jarum

Bechara’s Home Studio
Photo by Tony Jarum

Bechara Maalouf is a Lebanese-American visual artist and furniture designer based in Queens. With Stoop Stool, his initial foray into furniture making, Bechara repurposed scrap wood to build small, colorful stools that he would leave around the city for lucky passersby to “stoop.” As his style developed over the years, Bechara’s work has remained heavily influenced by this “pay-it-forward” mindset and his penchant for upcycled materials. Using anything at his disposal as creative fodder - be it scrapwood, metal, or his own memories - Bechara has gone on to build tables, mirrors, and a number of custom built-in commissions. This Spring, Bechara and I sat down to speak about his latest project, a solo show featuring a series of lamps inspired by his family’s home in Lebanon.

Before our discussion, I began considering Bechara’s work through the lens of "midnight," the thematic wrapper of this edition of Spark. Initially, the connection between lamps and light - their power to illuminate and guide us through darkness - seemed like a natural entry point. But midnight isn’t just characterized by the absence of light or the shadows at night. It’s a threshold or inflection point; a marker of transition as one day transforms into the next.

Transformation quickly became the north star of our conversation, guiding us from the mountains of Lebanon to dusty woodshops in New York’s five boroughs. At the core of this journey were three distinct instances of metamorphosis that have shaped Bechara’s art practice; the transformation of overlooked materials into newfound objects, of abstract memories into physical forms, and of repressed identities into new versions of one’s own self. In our conversation, we talked about stooping furniture in a post-Covid NYC, crafting “objects of love,” designing for longevity, and what durability even means when limited time, scarce resources, and military conflict threaten the integrity of both our possessions and our memories.

Stoop Stool
2020
Photo by Bechara Maalouf

Bechara making Stoop Stools in the Bronx
Photo by Jordan Stanton

JS When did you first get into furniture design?

BM I guess it was in school. I tinkered a bit, but I think it was really when I got my first job after school at a furniture company called Chassie. They did standing desk furniture and a lot of custom built-in bespoke furniture projects. It was a place to create dust, which is not an easy thing to find in New York. Eventually, I was given a key to the space, which was huge. That opened a whole little world for me. I lived down the street and I could go there whenever I wanted. All this colorful scrap wood that was just sitting around. They had no idea what to do with it. And so that was my cue, and I was able to take that wood, use those tools, and I think that was a huge part of what informed any of my design decisions - what I had available to me.

JS Is that how Stoop Stool was born?

BM Exactly. It was the first thing I designed that had legs, not just in the literal sense.

JS I'm literally sitting on a Stoop Stool right now.

BM Yeah, and it was inspired by a multitude of things, but I think the primary inspiration was Covid. There wasn't much going on, and a lot of people were moving out of the city. And things like Stooping NYC were born - it’s an Instagram account where they basically post furniture that’s left out on the street with the coordinates, and you could go get it if you want it. I was super inspired by that. I was working at a place that let me use their stuff for free, and I had an urge to share that. I wanted to design something that would nest into the scrap wood efficiently, basically.

JS I've also heard you describe the stools as “objects of love” - can you speak more to that? What was the reception like when you started?

BM It was fun. It was a lot of love. Well the design, this wasn’t intentional, but if you look at a photo of the stool, it kind of looks like a little guy holding up the world. And I didn’t mean to do that, but it worked and I really love it. It was a weird dark time in the city. And the stools I was making were colorful and playful, and I felt like it just made sense to make something and leave it out on the street. That was the way I envisioned myself having other people see my work. I'd make five of 'em with whatever scrap wood we had that day. But I'd go to Soho or somewhere with a lot of foot traffic. And I would place one on the street and I would go sit maybe 15 feet away on a bench and kind of just wait for someone to come, and I would leave a little note. “Hit me up on my Instagram, blah, blah, blah.” And I met a few funny people and I had a couple chance encounters that made it worth doing more.

JS But at a certain point, you stop just stooping them and you start actually selling them, right?

BM It felt weird because my original intention was to give them away, but it got to the point where I had used most of the scrap wood laying around at Chassie. Plus I was using the CNC at work so much that they were like, okay, you should probably pay for this. A lot of my friends bought it, I think because they wanted to support me, but ultimately now they have one and they're going to hold onto it for a long time.

Floor Plant Stand
2025
photo by Jeremy Willie Cox

Fleur Hand and Compact Mirror
photo by Bechara Maalouf

JS Was it trippy starting to see your work in friends' houses at first?

BM Yeah, for sure. It's been a few years now, so I've kind of forgotten or lost track of how many people have bought 'em, but a lot did, and it warms my heart.

JS Eventually you started exploring other materials, like metal. What inspired that transition, and what was that process like for you?

BM What really happened was I stopped working at Chassie. I kept trying to make the stools in other places with other CNC machines, but it was getting really expensive. Eventually I found access to plasma cutters for aluminum and steel. I started with some shelving units, mirrors, lamps - each of these projects introduced me to new tools and materials.

JS You recently had a show - can you tell me more about it?

BM So the show was at Forecast, which is a concept store and gallery in Green Point, Brooklyn. I started selling some things there and I built a relationship with the owners. They've been super supportive of my work.

JS What kind of pieces did you make for it? Was it your first show?

BM It was my first solo show ever, which is pretty exciting. I basically made a series of lamps. They're inspired by a lamp I made about a year ago, and the whole show is super tied into just my own memory and identity. I'm half Lebanese and half Michigander. It's been a tough few years in the Middle East and, at the time when I made the first lamp, Lebanon was getting bombed. I felt an urge to create something that brought the memories and the feelings I had about Lebanon to the forefront of my mind.

JS How much of your previous art practice was informed by that identity, if at all?

BM Very little. I've always been inspired by the aesthetics of Lebanese culture. I've gone there almost every year since I was born, and my dad is from there. It's a huge part of my life, so it's always been around me. But I've never tapped into it. And that wasn't intentional - there was no spark that made me initially want to do that.

Exhibition Shot of Bechara Maalouf: Flights are Cheaper in May
at Forecast Gallery, Greenpoint, NY
2025
Photo by Tina Nguyen

Exhibition Shot of Bechara Maalouf: Flights are Cheaper in May
at Forecast Gallery, Greenpoint, NY.
2025
Photo by Tina Nguyen

Exhibition Shot of Bechara Maalouf: Flights are Cheaper in May
at Forecast Gallery, Greenpoint, NY
2025
Photo by Tina Nguyen

JS When I first met you, you introduced yourself as Evan, and you were Evan for the first five years that I knew you, right?

BM Yeah.

JS Around when did you start going by Bechara? And was that transition connected to any change in how you approached your art?

BM Definitely. Bechara is my first name, and Evan is my middle name. I think growing up in Michigan I don't know if ashamed is the right word - but I felt really weird about “Bechara,” you know what I mean? Anytime I had a substitute teacher and they did roll call, I would get red in the face. I wish I had embraced it earlier, but when I moved to New York I saw how people stood behind their identities, their nationalities, their heritage - and it inspired me to do the same.

JS So you've been going to Lebanon pretty much every year since you've been alive. Are there any specific memories or experiences from your visits that inspired the pieces you made for the show?

BM My family's house in Lebanon is where we would spend most of the time.

JS Where was that?

BM In a small village in Mount Lebanon. They're all Maaloufs over there. That's my last name. And that's where my grandma lived, it's where my great aunt and uncle lived, it's where their parents lived, and it's where their parents' parents lived. And there's this house there that basically was willed to my father when they passed, and the core of all my memories in Lebanon take place in that house or in that village. The house was originally built in the early 1900s. They added to it again in the 1950s, and it's been the same ever since. It's a wild place. It's very beautiful. I have memories of running down to a river nearby that passes through the mountains. I have memories of all the fresh fruit, the coffee that people would drink every single morning. I have memories of me burning my hands playing with fireworks from the little grocery store that was up the street. I had a running tab with the owner where I would just buy a bunch of fireworks and set them off on the road by myself. It's just a very different way of living there. People lived off their land, and it's a very old place. I think once I started trying to explore that side of my own identity, all these things came back up. And that's what influenced me to start designing for the show. It’s been a way to explore the heritage I had that has more or less been suppressed for some years.

The Derreck Floor Lamp

The Derreck Floor Lamp
2023
Photo by Jeremy Willie Cox

JS Why did you choose lamps as your entry point for exploring this part of your identity?

BM I had been making tables and stools for so long, and lamps were the next frontier that I wanted to tackle. They're more technical. They have a whole other component - wiring and lighting - and I was super curious to explore that. I think like Stoop Stools, they are absolutely objects of love. The whole thing is basically me attempting to memorialize this place, in a way that's more permanent than in my own brain. I know that that house will be there for many, many years to come. But I wanted to make it more front and center in my own life.

JS I hate to be this corny, but when I heard that you were choosing to make lights. I mean, lights illuminate things. And you're shining a light on this part of your identity that you haven't really explored through your art.

BM Yeah, totally. The whole show was based on my memories of this house specifically, and one of the fundamental features of the house are its bright red windows. The house is basically a big brick box, but then it has these crazy detailed, beautiful wrought iron windows that are painted bright red. It's hard to look at the house and not immediately see them. And that was the motif I chose to explore for the lights. Light shines through windows, so it makes sense to try to design something that light would shine through - something that's already resembling the window. The form of the lamp itself is pretty simple. It's just an extruded rectangle.

JS And it's immediately discernible how the details on the windows themselves influenced the panel detailing. So how many pieces did you make in total? And are there any other features of the house or your memories in Lebanon that came to life in the different iterations you did for the show?

BM I made seven different sized lamps that take different forms. I have some table lamps, some sconces, and a floor lamp. The whole show explores my own memory of this place. So while I have a lot of old family photos of me there playing, and I have photos on my iPhone of me there two years ago, I wanted to try to do a lot of it from memory. So the first thing I did was recreate this window maybe a dozen times just from memory. So there are different iterations of the window across the seven lamps. And I also have so many little tokens or found objects - memorabilia from that place. In the first iteration of the lamp, I have a cherry as the dimmer switch. Because the house is in an orchard with cherry trees. For the next lamp, I used a Lebanese coffee cup for the dimmer. I also have a distinct memory of going up a little further up the mountain and finding fossils on the side, like snail fossils, so that’s a dimmer on another lamp. And all these things help ground these memories into the objects I’m making.

Video by Jordan Stanton
Original composition by Gilad Granot

Bechara Maalouf enjoying cherries at his family’s home in Lebanon

MP01: Cherries
Aluminum, Stainless Steel, Wire Mesh, Translucent Sheet, Electronics, Plastic Cherry
2025

JS It's interesting to be using the artifacts of memory themselves to be mechanisms that control brightness of the light. It's like there's something poetic in that - that these tokens themselves are increasing the strength of the memory, the intensity.

BM And I think the whole point was to protect these memories. I was talking to Rami, who's a very important person in my life, but we were talking about how one function of windows is to protect what's on the inside, you know what I mean? And sort of the function of these lamps was to protect these memories that I have. So trying to tie those ideas in as well. It's been important.

JS Yeah, just seeing how many layers of meaning you can unpack with these objects is really cool. When I first learned about this project, it was when you announced the design on your Instagram. It was like a year ago in the fall of 2024. Around that time Israel carried out a pager bomb attack and invaded Lebanon, and then started an aerial bombing campaign. Hundreds of Lebanese civilians were murdered and thousands were displaced - not to mention the countless Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank who'd already experienced the same fate. And I remember texting you when bombs were falling on Beirut. I can't even imagine how much you were thinking about family at the time, but also I imagine this house was probably top of mind for you too, in a way.

BM My dad was there in Lebanon when that happened, and he was actually at this house when the bombs were falling. And my aunts and cousins were all in Beirut, and Beirut is pretty divided East to West between Christians and Muslims. So a lot of what I was hearing was like, “Oh yeah, we're fine. That's happening far away.” But that’s “far away” like how The Bronx is to Brooklyn. So, for me, being thousands of miles away, in the grand scheme of things, that's really close, you know what I mean?

JS I’ve heard you describe the lamp you made as a “memory protector” - and I'm just curious what that term means to you within this context.

BM I think it's always been less about protecting the places physically and much more about protecting them emotionally. My dad left Lebanon during the Civil War. For my father, I know that he wants to go back. He wants to retire and live the rest of his life there. And the more violence and the more conflict that we see, the less likely that that is to happen because the primary infrastructure of Lebanon is being harmed. You know what I mean?

JS I mean, it makes me think about just how basically every month since October 7th 2023 has set a new record in the popular conscience of what 100% carnage can look like. We’ve seen how full metropolitan cities can be completely laid to waste, or how images of entire neighborhoods being razed to the ground are pretty commonplace now in a way that's unsettling. I don't think we have even reckoned with what seeing these images - of Gaza, different refugee camps and schools, even in the West Bank, just being completely demolished - has done to us.

BM That horrible stuff will happen, and it's not like it only affects the area that it happened. It's like millions of people are fleeing South Lebanon, they're going somewhere, or when people were evacuating in Beirut, that affects the foundational infrastructure of the city and eventually will impact the overall wellbeing of the country.

Window reflection at the house in Kfertay
Photo by Natalie Maalouf

JS Yeah, I mean, speaking personally as an American citizen witnessing this from afar, it's almost gotten to a point where, over the past year, the degree to which the images of this devastation are so easily accessible on my Instagram has colored my conception of cities or buildings in the Middle East. Because of the all-out destruction, my mind is more anchored to that lack of infrastructure, like literal bombed out craters where buildings used to stand, than seeing these structures intact in their original glory and beauty, with all the design quirks and flourishes that clearly have inspired your art. So it just makes me feel like it is all the more important to be doing this kind of memory protection work.

BM Yeah, absolutely. Even visiting Lebanon throughout the many years that I've visited with my dad, every time we would pass a building with bullet holes in it from the war in the eighties, that stuff is still there. 40 years later it's lasting. And so yeah, I guess a lot of it was with the goal to put these artifacts in these memories just into an object now.

Untitled Stool
photo by Derek Gardner

Childhood photo of Bechara at his family’s home in Lebanon

JS Knowing how personal this project is, how often do you think about the life that your work takes on in different spaces or in the homes of others? And how, if at all, it transforms in that process of transition?

BM My response isn't as romantic as your question. So I mean, first off, it makes me very happy. Bottom line, it warms my heart. And this happened a lot when I was doing commissioned work, but I just had this fear that I want these things to last as long as possible with whatever person. And I always have this fear that they might not. If someone has outlived it and they want to move on with it, that's their prerogative. But I think my goal as a designer is to make it possible that that's their choice. I would hate for something that I've made to deteriorate or break or not stand the test of time and wither away.

JS We talked about stooping in NYC, and the whole idea is it is literally a transition or baton pass from one home to another. The life that the object endured with one owner finishes, and then a transition occurs, and it gets a whole new start.

BM My goal, my own personal goal is for my work to last long enough to make that pass. You know what I mean? I would be overjoyed if I saw a Stoop Stool being stooped on the side of the street. It would be the craziest feeling in the world. But seeing one in the trash, because it didn't stand a chance or stand the test of time, would be a very different feeling. The whole reason I'm doing this in the first place is to create objects that have a lasting life.

JS And I mean, I think it, it's perfectly natural to have anxieties about structural integrity or your work not being able to last. But wear and tear kind of pales in the face of missiles and bombs falling. That's why it's important, at least from where I'm sitting, to be doing the memory of those objects some justice through preservation.

BM You're right. Definitely. I never really thought about it that way.

JS Different problems though.

pictured (left to right): Jordan Stanton, Bechara Maalouf, and Rami Farawi at Bechara’s solo exhibition

Bechara Maalouf and Jordan Stanton in Lebanon
Photo by Rami Farawi

BM Different problems. And it just made me think of a whole nother type of wear and tear that the house is subject to that isn’t fire or fury. It's purely just what happens with time. The village is made up of maybe 15 homes, and probably two thirds of them are empty because the people have grown old and died. And so not only is it up against violence in a conventional way, but it's also just facing time head-on, as it works naturally. Because people are growing up, they're leaving, people are passing away, and the house just sits there. And even ours sits there empty for a majority of the year. And so that was sort of another intention of mine - to find another way to preserve the home in my own life.

JS Yeah, totally. And as a part of that memory preservation, I was also just thinking about it a level deeper within the context of midnight and transition and transformation. Like the bright red iron window fixtures on your family’s home. They're being transformed by your memory from window fixtures into design gestures on different lamps, these sources of light. And you're not even just tracing an image. You're drawing from your memory, which I think is a really sick artistic inclination. And then these objects illuminate the spaces they exist in - first at Forecast for your show and then ultimately maybe other people's homes if you choose to sell them to your friends and your community. So in that sense, you will be illuminating the homes of others with the memory of your family’s home. It's almost like house inception.

BM Yeah, I wanted to create that for myself at first. And then I really liked it, so I wanted to do more and I wanted to share it. But the whole original goal was to bring a little piece of my family’s home into my own home.

Follow Bechara Maalouf here.
Interview and foreword Jordan Stanton.
Photography by Tony Jarum, Jordan Stanton, Bechara Maalouf, Rami Farawi, Jeremy Willie Cox, Tina Nguyen.

Spark Interview-047