About
Omar Chakil was born Omar El Wakil in Beirut in 1974 to a Lebanese motherand moved to Paris three months later. He carries multiple worlds simultaneously, Lebanese, French, and Egyptian. His family’s lineage within Egypt’s intellectual and institutional life spans generations. This position, never fully contained within a single tradition, is not incidental to his work. It is its driving force.
His practice is an act of presence and translation, performed across disciplines over time: first through music, as one of the early architects of Soul in France where Warner Music named him Omar Chakil as a contraction of his birth name Omar Chams El Wakil; then through the design of private interiors across the globe; and through objects, installations, and writing.
His engagement with Egyptian alabaster onyx began by circumstance and evolved into a clear artistic vision, bringing the material into contemporary design and helping define the idea of collectible design in Egypt.
Once sacred to the pharaonic world, the material had fallen into neglect, displaced by imported stones and reduced to ornamental clichés.
Chakil re-engages it in its unaltered state, situating it firmly in the present. Working from solid blocks, in collaboration with local craftsmen and using what the land provides, he reveals what he describes as the material’s animism, a living presence rooted in soil and enhanced through a singular contemporary language.
For Chakil, material, like culture, reaches its fullest expression through encounter. His approach is grounded in métissage, understood not as fusion but as expansion. His alabaster travels, entering into dialogue with other materials, with forms and mythologies from different traditions, and with the gaze of visitors, collectors and institutions across continents. It is through this movement that vision and material fully assert themselves. His works occupy a space between furniture and sculpture without resolving into either. The Sobek Bench, a capsule traversed by a vein of alabaster quartz crystal, originates from a 3D scan of a Nile crocodile’s tail, rendered as an abstract fossil form. The Uraeus Birth Chairs, crowned with hooded cobras, reclaim an Egyptian lineage for a typology long associated with European history. Across his work, intuition, sharpened through years of experience, operates in service of enduring forms of connection.
His first series sold out at Beirut Design Week in 2018 and subsequently traveled across Europe, the MENA region and the United States. A Birth Chair later set an auction record for contemporary Egyptian alabaster at Piasa. His work has since been exhibited internationally, including at Le Salon, New York; the Institut du Monde Arabe, Paris; the Doha Biennial; and Nomad. In 2025, Galerie Gastou, Paris, presented his most recent body of work, marking the gallery’s first collaboration with a Middle Eastern artist. His works are held in private and institutional collections worldwide.
Architectural Digest has selected him in their referential Top 100 list for five consecutive years.
French Egyptian Lebanese former singer/songwriter, creative consultant, interior designer, product designer and artist Omar ‘Chakil’ El Wakil briefly studied design at Milan’s DOMUS academy but defines himself as “self taught”.
Omar is a natural esthete who tries to bridge a variety of cultural gaps through his creative practice.
After decorating private homes around the globe for nearly two decades, Omar started experimenting with limited edition objects and furniture.
His first series exclusively made from raw Egyptian alabaster blocks sold out at Over The Counter’ gallery during Beirut’s 2018 design week and travelled with similar success to France, KSA, Italy and America. His work has been increasingly solicited by archi¬ tects and galleries around the globe ever since.
Known for introducing Egyptian Alabaster into contemporary design, Omar also brought the concept of collectible design to Egypt. His pieces were featured in numerous exhibitions around the globe including Dubai Expo 2020, prestigious French auction house Piasa, MENART fair in Brussels, Le Salon in New York, traveling collectible fair Nomad in St Moritz and Venice, Carwan in Athens and a solo show in Cairo.
Architectural Digest selected him in their referential top 50 list for the Middle East’s brightest talents in architecture and design for three consecutive years including 2024.