Before the pandemic, chef and artist Laila Gohar hosted a dinner party in her Manhattan apartment at least once a week, inviting artists, designers, writers, actors and others to eat and drink together at her table. “My house has an open door policy,” Gohar says. “I always think, ‘If you can have 10 people, you can always make 12.’” After social distancing became the norm and dinner parties were a thing of the past, Gohar’s own work and life changed. Suddenly, the time seemed right to rethink an idea she and her younger sister Nadia, also an artist, had been considering for years: how do you translate the experience of dining together—of treating everyday rituals with reverence—into objects that last an evening?
Their answer is Gohar World, a playful collection of 40 handmade table accessories. There are lace hats for vegetables, glass knife and fork rests shaped like pieces of hard candy, and a candlestick made to hold eggs instead of candles. “People long to be together and to be things that seem like they take time to make,” says Laila, who uses food as her medium, creating installations and abstract table scenes in which roses are suspended in fish-shaped jelly or butter. . shaped to resemble hands.
The duo had originally envisioned their project as a way to revive specific arts-and-crafts traditions, involving lacemakers, glassblowers and chandlers from Vienna to Milan to their native Cairo. Nadia, who also lives in New York City, oversaw much of the production, and the sisters’ maternal grandmother, Nabila, a former seamstress, contributed many of the black bows that serve as napkin rings and decorate baguette bags. .
Eventually, the line will be expanded to a physical location in New York. “We always hold something up and ask each other, ‘Is this too chic for its own good?’ If something is, it’s a failure,” Laila says. “At the end of the day, it’s about partying and people coming together. If you’re precious and have no humor, what’s the point?”
Photo Assistant: Nathaniel Jerome. Set Assistants: Malena Burman, Yukimi Furusono
