Caliber Brings Back 70s Flair With a Modernised Furniture Collection

Nostalgia seeps through every pore of Caliber's newest furniture collection. With a name like '1977', the collection is not shy about its generational influences. You wouldn't be blamed for expecting bright colours with flowers everywhere and patterns appropriated from the Beatles' trip to India, but the Cairo-based decor studio took a different approach for their second collection. The collection looks more like an old sepia-toned photograph, the kind that your grandparents might share while reminscing about the early days of rock and roll, the first time they installed a television in their homes, and a decade where absolutely everything changed forever.

"I found it very inspiring," Omar Sruji, one of the founders of Caliber alongside Saad Kamar, tells SceneHome. "Art during this period went through a huge upheaval. We tried to draw inspiration without being too typical about it, so we gave it a modern, minimalist touch."

Although the colours are muted - neutral and understated - the form of the collection's pieces shine through, unambiguously inspired by the fashion of the 1970s. The Hippie Chair provides a comfortable seat with its faux furry texture, while the Lake Como coffee table gives a quirky bend to your living room space. Fluid and wavy forms reappear in the Elvis Mirror, and are contrasted with the straight-edged glass surfaces of the Disco side tables, a sort of deconstructed disco ball flattened out into flattering cubes. Pieces like the Camaleonda sofa and the Bauhaus chair carry a strong sense of familiarity - they're not merely 70s furniture, they're furniture you've grown up with at one point or another.

Sruji and Kamar studied architecture together at the Arab Academy for Science, Technology & Maritime Transport before working in the same firm in 2019. They found the world of client services to be too constraining, so they decided to break out into independent furniture design together. It's the sort of flexibility that is reflected in their designs, and which they hope to expand on with their gradually growing catalogue of inspired pieces.