Salem Charabi smiles a lot. He smiles as he greets you, he smiles when asked a question and he smiles when answering. While doing so, he exposes a charming gap between his front teeth and makes grand hand gestures to illustrate his words. Here, the architect-cum-designer discusses utopian architecture, running your own studio and infusing a bit of where you’re from—in Charabi’s case, Egypt and Denmark—into the things that you create.

When did you learn that you wanted to become an architect?
I’ve always had a curiosity toward spaces and how they can make you feel a certain way. There’s a saying that you forget what people look like and you forget what people say but you never forget how they made you feel. Becoming an architect has been a search to both understand and ultimately provoke that type of spatial experience.

The Danish design scene is highly competitive. What are you doing differently?
I’ve always been drawn to buildings where every detail, from the door handle to the floor to the light, are all worked to equal perfection. I have a workshop in Nordhavn—an area in the northeast of Copenhagen—where I do all my work. There’s this Danish term håndnær, meaning near to the hand. When objects are in your hands, you begin to acknowledge the techniques required to create them along with a growing appreciation of the material. This informs the design process at a far earlier stage, as opposed to starting out with a drawing and working your way forward from there. It’s about forgoing the preconceived notion of the given object and instead taking an investigatory approach.

Can someone ever truly stand out if it is their conscious intention to do so, or is individuality something that arises as one progresses within a field?
If one really seeks to make a difference within architecture, it shouldn’t be about seeking the grand. It should be about going to a scale that is smaller than what we have gotten accustomed to in our highly industrialized world. Over time, one forms a far stronger sense of identity if seeking to answer the given conditions that are at hand, rather than heading straight for a grander utopia.

Does your Egyptian heritage influence your approach to design?
There is a great difference in the ways that a highly industrialized country such as Denmark and a less industrialized country such as Egypt work. In Denmark, craftsmanship is exotic and gives added validation to objects, whereas in Egypt, it is far more innate in the culture. It is something that you do out of need—a reaction to the questions at hand. I have the appreciation from having roots in a place with a greater ease of means, making intuition play a much bigger role in how things are made, combined with the mythically beautiful Arabic aesthetic that is so deeply rooted within me. From both influences come the material and tactile appreciations. But even more, there is the aspect of memory—dedicating a little bit of where you come from to whatever you create.

What are the most boring parts of running your own studio?
Logistics. They make up a lot of your daily workload when you’re running an independent studio. The amount of phone calls and practicalities along with pushing for deliveries can be exhausting at times. The most boring part is undoubtedly spending time not creating.

How do the materials you use influence your design process?
When you start to work with the actual material and its underlying meanings, you begin to realize why brick houses are red in some parts of the country and yellow in others. In the Middle East, the roofs are flat while in Europe, they’re angled. Historically, this has been what has informed our architecture; the contexts of climate, the economy and culture that together shape the architecture of our inhabitance. In that lies a lot of poetry, taking every minuscule aspect into sincere consideration.

Would you say that you have a romantic relationship with architecture?
Deeply, to the point of full-throttle emotionality. The romantic level is somehow connected to rediscovering an intimacy within what and how we create, rather than being nostalgic about the past or unrealistic about what I can achieve within my work. In that romanticized view of my work, it’s about setting the best example for what I believe a profession should be.