October 2026 | With Nicolas Bellavance-Lecompte

Nicolas Bellavance-Lecompte standing beneath the geometric ceiling of Zayed International Airport, Abu Dhabi

I first met this month’s guest when I was working on an apartment in Beirut back in 2017, looking for unique design pieces to furnish it. I knew his work as a designer through Oeuffice, and had noticed his acutely precise eye for spotting unexplored creative territories through his gallery, Carwan. The term “collectible design” still seemed relatively new at the time, and I remember Carwan as the first contemporary design gallery in Beirut, and probably in the region. When I presented my first series of Egyptian alabaster works at Over The Counter, itself pioneering a concept-store typology unlike anything Beirut had seen before, Nicolas was among the first to reach out, taking my work to Saudi Arabia and later to Greece. The international resonance of the design scene in Lebanon, which he had so remarkably helped shape, was something unique to witness. The physical presence of works that blurred the lines between art and design, in a space accessible to all, nourished ambitions and inspired a generation of designers who, in turn, ignited a renewed approach to craft and design in Lebanon, one that echoed throughout the MENA region and beyond. Nicolas Bellavance-Lecompte is essentially an architect and curator of Canadian and Italian descent, yet he is difficult to really pin down. His presence in the cross-cultural constellation we like to inhabit is undeniable. He is known for developing site-specific formats that challenge conventional exhibition models. With over sixty-five international projects across Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, he treats design as a language of dialogue, exploring the intersections of cultural identity, material knowledge, and geopolitical context across diverse territories. Through collaborations with museums, foundations, and leading luxury houses, he creates experiences that are both critically grounded and sensorially precise. A perfect incarnation of this approach is NOMAD, the nomadic, context-driven design fair that continually reinvents the conventional fair format. Nicolas is its founding director. NOMAD returns to Abu Dhabi this November for its second edition, making this exchange all the more stimulating.

Hello my friend, I’m so happy to welcome you to my Diaries. How and where are you?

Hello Omar! I’m good, slightly overwhelmed, as you can probably imagine. I’m between Milan, St. Moritz, Paris, Abu Dhabi and wherever the next plane takes me. We are two months away from NOMAD Abu Dhabi, so it’s that particular moment when everything you have been imagining for a year suddenly has to become very real. But I like these moments. There is a strange energy in bringing all these people, objects and ideas together and watching something that existed mostly in your head slowly take physical form. And I’m very happy to be doing this with you because we’ve known each other through so many different chapters. Beirut feels like another lifetime now.

I can only imagine how busy you must be these days. I myself am overwhelmed by the concentration of events happening everywhere at the same time! NOMAD Abu Dhabi last year was a surreal moment, which I eventually compared to a Wes Anderson movie. The attention to detail and witty use of the abandoned airport location was something to remember. How is this year’s edition going to differ from the first one?

I still love your Wes Anderson comparison! Last year was really about discovering the airport. Nobody quite knew what to expect, including us. There was something incredibly powerful about entering this abandoned terminal and suddenly seeing it inhabited again by objects, people, conversations, dinners, music. We deliberately didn’t try to erase what the building had been. The airport itself became one of the protagonists. This year we understand the building much better, so we can be more ambitious with it. We are working much more with commissions, architecture and site-specific interventions, and also extending NOMAD beyond Terminal 1 into the city at Erth Hotel. What interests me is not making it bigger simply for the sake of being bigger. I want it to become more layered. Abu Dhabi is changing incredibly quickly, and NOMAD should somehow capture this moment while also creating conversations with the history, craft and material culture of the region. I don’t want to import a European design fair into Abu Dhabi. That would be completely uninteresting to me.

How did NOMAD come to you?

Almost accidentally, although looking backwards it probably wasn’t accidental at all. I had spent years with my design gallery working with designers, artists and craftspeople, travelling constantly and exhibiting at fairs. I became increasingly frustrated with the conventional fair model. You would travel halfway across the world with extraordinary objects and then put them inside the same white booth you could have built in Basel, Miami or Dubai. The geography became almost irrelevant. I wanted to do exactly the opposite. The idea was very simple: what if the place came first? What if every edition existed only because of its location, and the architecture, landscape, culture and community around it became part of the exhibition? The first NOMAD was in Monaco in 2017, inside Villa La Vigie. We didn’t really know whether it would work. But immediately there was a different intimacy between people and objects. People stayed. They talked. They had lunch. They came back. It felt closer to visiting someone’s house than attending a trade fair. That intimacy is still what I try to protect today.

I sometimes think of you as a kind of Indiana Jones of design (there must be more expert comparisons, but that’s the one I use, so there you go). I have witnessed you travel the world to unexplored territories that weren’t, and sometimes still aren’t, associated with design. Places like Algeria, Rwanda, West Africa, Qatar and more. I was blessed to have you amongst the people who helped shed light on my work in Egypt as well. As I previously mentioned, you created the first collectible design gallery in Beirut in 2010. So may I ask how a Montreal-born Canadian-Italian architect ended up in such far-off places? Why did you leave Canada, and what motivated you to settle in places like Beirut, Athens and Milan, where you now live, if I’m not mistaken?

I think curiosity has always been much stronger in me than the desire for stability. I left Canada quite young because I had this enormous appetite to see what existed elsewhere. Europe came first, then the Middle East, and one place constantly led to another. Beirut was particularly important. When I arrived there, there was an incredible creative energy but very little infrastructure around contemporary design. That was exciting to me because you weren’t entering an established system. You could actually participate in building something. And then travelling in places like Egypt, Algeria, Rwanda, Togo or elsewhere taught me something fundamental: some of the most interesting creative cultures exist precisely in places that the international design system has historically ignored. I’ve never been particularly interested in going somewhere because everybody else is already there. Usually the opposite attracts me. Athens came at another moment in my life, Milan at another. Sicily has become important to me too. I think I’ve slowly accepted that I probably don’t belong entirely to one place. Home for me is more a constellation of places and people than a single geography.

That’s a question that you must be asked very often, but what do you most identify as? Designer? Architect? Curator? Entrepreneur?

This question always makes me uncomfortable because I don’t really know! My education is architecture, and I think architecture probably remains the way my brain works. I think spatially. Even when I’m working on an exhibition, a company or a cultural project, I’m thinking about relationships, proportions, sequences and how different elements connect. But I don’t feel particularly attached to professional definitions. Sometimes I’m a curator, sometimes an entrepreneur, sometimes a designer, sometimes I’m basically solving where a truck needs to arrive at three in the morning! Maybe what interests me is creating frameworks in which other people can do interesting things. If I had to choose one word, perhaps “cultural entrepreneur”, although even that sounds much more serious than I feel.

I know how diverse, researched and focused you are in your work. You’ve art-directed the Fonderia Battaglia, which I hope to be lucky to work with sometime. You’ve also played an important part in bringing the world of Siwa in Egypt to international curated travellers. Too many experiences to name, diverse in geography and also in discipline. What would you say is the common thread between these endeavours besides you? And how do you choose a project?

Curiosity, definitely. And probably a certain attraction to things that haven’t been completely defined yet. Fonderia Battaglia fascinated me because you had this extraordinary material knowledge accumulated over more than a century and the question was how contemporary designers could enter into dialogue with it. Siwa was completely different geographically and culturally, but fundamentally the question wasn’t so different. There was extraordinary knowledge, architecture, landscape and craft that existed long before we arrived. The interesting part was not to “design” Siwa but to understand how contemporary creativity could engage with it without destroying what made it special in the first place. I tend to choose projects where I feel I can learn something. If I already know exactly what the outcome will be before starting, I lose interest quite quickly. And people matter enormously. Life is too short to spend two years making something beautiful with people you don’t enjoy having dinner with.

How do your Canadian and Italian heritage (if you recognise these within yourself) contribute to your creative and entrepreneurial journey?

More than I probably realise. Canada gave me a certain openness. Growing up in Montreal, different languages, identities and cultures coexist quite naturally. You learn early that identity doesn’t necessarily have to be singular in a North American context. Italy gave me something completely different: an obsession with beauty, proportion, material, food, objects, architecture and the idea that these things aren’t superficial. They are part of how you live. And perhaps the combination explains something about me. There is a North American part that says, “Why not? Let’s make it happen,” and an Italian part that then spends three days worrying about whether the chair is in exactly the right position.

You have travelled extensively in Africa and the Middle East. Do you have plans to explore Asia and Latin America, if you haven’t already?

Absolutely. Asia is becoming increasingly interesting to me, particularly India. I’ve been having conversations there recently and I find the relationship between contemporary design, craft, industry and an extraordinary depth of material culture fascinating. Latin America has been in my head for years as well. Mexico, Brazil and parts of South America have extraordinary design cultures. But I never want NOMAD to arrive somewhere simply because it would be strategically useful to put another pin on the map. There needs to be a reason, a place, a community and ideally a certain chemistry that makes you think: yes, something should happen here.

How do you see the role of AI in craft and design, and what do you think we should look forward to in craft and design in the near and distant future?

I think AI will make the human hand more important, not less. We are entering a period where generating an image, a form or an idea can happen almost instantaneously. That’s extraordinary, but it also means images and ideas themselves become incredibly abundant. What remains scarce? Knowledge. Material intelligence. The hand of somebody who has spent thirty years understanding stone, bronze, wood, glass, textiles or ceramics. The imperfections that come from making something rather than generating it. I don’t see AI and craft as enemies at all. Actually, I’m fascinated by what happens when extremely advanced technology encounters extremely ancient knowledge. But I think we’ll become much more sensitive to authenticity. We will want to know who made something, where the material came from and why it exists. The future may become technologically much more sophisticated and materially much more primitive at exactly the same time. I find that quite beautiful.

There seem to be moments in time when great disruptions happen and new, exciting waves take over the design and creative worlds. Movements like Art Deco, Modernism, Italian Radical Design, Pop, Memphis, to name only a few. I think collectible design, and the blurring of the lines between art and design, with craft celebrated as a transcending force, was one such moment, one that is still being defined in a way. What do you think characterises the present time, if that’s not a repeat from the previous question?

I think we are living through the end of a certain idea of globalisation in design. For twenty or thirty years there was this enormous acceleration toward sameness. The same architects, brands, hotels, galleries and aesthetics appeared everywhere. You could wake up in a hotel room and genuinely need a few seconds to remember whether you were in Singapore, London or New York. Now I feel an opposite movement. There is an enormous desire for specificity. People want to understand where something comes from. We are rediscovering vernacular architecture, indigenous materials, forgotten techniques and local forms of intelligence, but hopefully without treating them nostalgically. Craft is central to that, but I don’t think craft should mean returning to the past. The most interesting designers today use inherited knowledge to say something completely contemporary. Perhaps the defining movement of our time isn’t an aesthetic movement like Memphis or Art Deco. Perhaps it is a shift in values: from global to local, from anonymous to traceable, from perfect to imperfect, and from object to context.

Would you say NOMAD has now taken centre stage for you? Would you care to share projects or desires you look forward to?

Yes, undoubtedly. NOMAD has somehow become the place where almost everything I’ve done previously converges. Architecture, collecting, travel, curating, hospitality, craft, cultural exchange, and perhaps most importantly, people. Next year will be NOMAD’s tenth anniversary, which is slightly terrifying because I still feel like we started yesterday. I want to use that moment not simply to celebrate ten years but to ask what NOMAD should become for the next ten. I’m increasingly interested in projects that can exist beyond the few days of a fair: commissions, public art, architecture, cultural programmes and collaborations that leave something behind. And personally, I think I want to continue being surprised. There are still enormous parts of the world I know almost nothing about. That’s reassuring. I hope at sixty I’m still getting on planes to places people tell me make absolutely no sense.

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