studio olassan is an interdisciplinary design studio working across architecture, interiors, urban interventions, and installations. The studio is led by Ghassan El-Kobrosli and Aleksandra Jeziorska El-Kobrosli — a husband-and-wife collaboration grounded in shared authorship rather than divided roles.
Our practice is shaped through dialogue, disagreement, and exchange. Architectural strategy, spatial thinking, drawing, material sensitivity, and intuitive judgement are brought together to form a single design voice. This way of working allows projects to develop through depth and coherence, avoiding stylistic repetition or individual ego.
studio olassan was established in 2016 in Beirut, Lebanon — a city where architecture is never neutral, and space is inseparable from history, memory, and social tension. Working across architecture, interiors, exhibitions, installations, and urban projects in this context demanded adaptability, cultural awareness, and the ability to design within layered and often fragile conditions.
Since 2021, the practice has been based in Bristol, UK. Here, the studio applies the same sensitivity and critical approach within a different social and regulatory context, working on private homes, residential developments, restaurants, and community-led projects.
A particular focus of our work is the design of mosques and Islamic community centres across the South West, alongside ongoing international projects, including in Lebanon. This allows ideas, methods, and experience to move continuously between contexts rather than remain fixed to one place.
We understand space as something experienced before it is explained. Our work begins not with form, but with careful reading — of context, people, rituals, movement, and the perceptions that shape how places are inhabited and used.
Each project is approached on its own terms. Architecture is allowed to emerge through sequencing, restraint, and attention to use, rather than through predefined styles. Our work spans a range of scales, from private interiors to community buildings, often within sensitive conditions where design decisions carry social, cultural, or public consequence.
In these contexts, design requires patience, listening, and clarity of intent. We see architecture not as an isolated object, but as a relationship — an event unfolding between people, place, and time.
