Egyptian Studio 'Morphs the Summer' With Four North Coast Projects

For Morph + Design Studio, this summer came with four very different briefs. Across Egypt’s North Coast, the Egyptian studio moved between a multi-brand retail space, a fitness studio, a jewellery pavilion and a beachside pop-up, with each project asking for a different response to its setting, and audience.

Together, the projects form ‘Morphing the Summer’, an approach that allowed each space to develop its own visual language, guided by Morph’s interest in how people move through and experience a place.

“We were never interested in making four projects that looked like they came from the same studio,” says Morph co-founder Adham Shawki. “Each one had its own character, so our role was to understand that character and build around it.”

Located in Playa on the North Coast, the first project brings four brands - Matter, Kin Suki, Mother Naked and Be Indie - into one store. Each required a different way of displaying and experiencing its products, from clothing rails and tableware shelving to cosmetics testing areas and a working matcha counter. Morph gave each brand its own palette, using soft curves across the store to connect the different zones. At the centre, a sculptural cashier wrapped in rounded rings of pink, silver, navy and green rises into a mirrored canopy, becoming the meeting point between the four identities.

Matter occupies a white counter with citrus-green accents, Kin Suki sits against a deep green curved display wall, Be Indie’s clothing area uses electric blue and polished metal, and Mother Naked introduces pink and red. Mirrored surfaces allow the colours to overlap as visitors move through the space. “We had to understand how every brand actually worked,” Shawki explains. “The challenge was to give each one the right display solution without making the space feel like four separate stores placed next to one another.”

At Mud + Grace, inside B-FIT Sports Hub in Marassi, flexibility became the focus. The studio needed to accommodate yoga, Pilates, stretching and dance, alongside a distinct visual identity. Inspired by fragmented mountain formations, Morph created a rough concrete façade that appears broken open, revealing a smoke-toned glass storefront behind it.

“We wanted to create a sense of curiosity before people even stepped inside, the façade became our way of doing that,” Shawki says. Inside, steel shelving and cabinetry organise the studio equipment around an open floor that can adapt to different classes. Wood-toned flooring adds warmth to the concrete and metal palette.

At Marassi Marina, Morph approached another question: how to make a jewellery pavilion visible within a busy retail promenade. “With diamonds, we kept thinking about that moment when you open a jewellery box,” Shawki explains. “So, we asked ourselves: what if you could actually walk inside one?”

The Michael Oro pavilion translates this idea into a faceted structure of angled metal framing and glass. Inside, brushed stainless steel display counters wrap around the room, while a mustard-coloured, angular bench at the centre echoes the geometry of the exterior and creates a place to sit and try on jewellery.

At Seashell Beach, Bettr’s pop-up presented a different visibility challenge. Set within a shipping container, the structure needed to hold its own against the scale of the beach. “We couldn’t change the height of the container, so we had to find another way to make it stand out,” Shawki says.

Morph enlarged Bettr’s mascot and placed it on the roof with a boba drink and beach float, turning it into a recognisable marker from a distance. Oversized mint-green and white tubular forms wrap around the container, referencing striped umbrellas and inflatable floats. A rounded service window opens onto the beach, and an organic-shaped opening connects the kiosk visually to the seating beyond.

Across the four projects, Morph moves between retail, wellness, jewellery and hospitality, developing a different response for each brief. The common thread is the studio’s attention to behaviour: how people enter, move, pause, browse and interact. “For us, design is about creating feelings, a space can look good, but if it doesn’t make you feel something, interact differently or remember the experience, then it hasn’t really done enough,” Shawki says.