Egypt's Gimiza is Turning Your Summer Memories Into Tiles

What if you could take all the little things that make your summer your own and turn them into tiles across your beach house? The watermelon that somehow tastes better by the sea, the smell of jasmine outside the house, the chair on the terrace everyone knows is yours, the little in-jokes no one can possibly understand if you just weren't there - it's these fleeting moments that Gimiza wants to transform into tiles.

The Egyptian ceramic studio, founded by Alya Sabry and Ahmed Mostafa, has started creating custom, handmade tiles that pay homage to your favourite summer memories. There is no set collection to choose from. Instead, the memories themselves become the starting point.

“The idea is that at the end of the day, our tiles evoke a certain emotion in people,” Mostafa says. “We wanted to connect the drawings with the tiles, so everyone can have certain parts of summer forever, whether young or old. They can see their memories and remember them immediately.”

One of their first clients was a grandmother with a house on Egypt’s North Coast. She wanted a kitchen backsplash inspired by her grandchildren and the time they spent together in her home. The brief included their sandwiches, her chair, her prayers to the family, fish and waves.

“It was very random,” Sabry says. “The challenge was to combine all these elements, but it shouldn't look like a child's drawing. This was the challenging part.”

Rather than giving each request its own tile, Gimiza treated the backsplash as one large artwork, spreading the drawings, words and doodles across 200 tiles so they would come together as one continuous story. The same house also features a composition of fish and starfish tiles on the kitchen floor, including a large fish-shaped piece.

It is a good example of what Gimiza is interested in: taking the very specific things that belong to one family and finding a way to make them part of the space they live in.

That instinct comes from the founders’ own relationship with tiles. Sabry graduated from the Faculty of Fine Arts and initially worked as an architect before studying ceramics at the Jameel House of Traditional Arts in Cairo. She quickly became drawn to tiles in particular.

“I felt that tiles are one product, but their applications are never-ending,” she says. “They give endless results. Their variety is great.”

With her architectural background, Sabry was interested in the way tiles could become part of the story of a space rather than simply something applied to it. A tile could cover a wall, make up a floor, create a pattern or become an artwork in itself.

Mostafa came to the medium from a different direction. He was working in management when Sabry introduced him to ceramics, and what caught his attention was how much room there was to explore handmade tiles in Egypt.

“When we started, the concept of making handmade tiles didn't exist,” he says. “So, we found that there was a lot of room for us to explore this area from the beginning.”

They started Gimiza as a family business and art project, with Sabry taking over Mostafa’s balcony as their first studio. Today, she leads the making process while Mostafa moves between the business and creative sides, often pushing her ideas in new directions.

“He has a big influence on the design,” Sabry says. “He encourages me a lot.”

Their inspiration moves between the built and natural worlds. Gimiza looks to Islamic architecture for shapes, while rocks, minerals, plants and flowers influence their colours and textures. They also work with Egyptian clay and glazes, keeping the materials as close to home as possible.

“The colour combinations in nature are really something extraordinary,” Mostafa says. “For me and for Alya, this is a very big source of inspiration.”

The clay is shaped by hand, fired, glazed and fired again, with minerals and metal oxides helping create the final colours. What emerges from the kiln can be different from what they imagined, depending on the heat and the materials.

“What's nice is that you take the clay from the ground and the minerals from the mountains and in the end, you make something new,” Mostafa says. “This process is exciting. You take everything raw and then you make something beautiful.”

With the summer memory tiles, the raw material is something else too: the memories themselves. Sabry’s own tile would feature her childhood bicycle, recalling a summer scene that has stayed with her. Mostafa thinks of the fruits, flowers and plants he associates with returning to the coast, remembering them through their colours, flavours and scents.

For those looking to create their own, Gimiza takes custom requests through its social media, where clients can share their ideas and start a conversation about turning them into tiles for their own summer spaces.