Direction stays close.
Strategic intent, design position and integration remain under direct senior leadership rather than being diluted through layers of account management.
Studio
Small core. Wide field.
HYRAX is an independent design studio built around a focused leadership core and an international network of architects, designers, engineers and specialists. The team expands around the problem, not the other way around.
Our model
Integrated by design.
HYRAX operates across architecture, interiors, identity, wayfinding, experience and strategy. We do not treat those disciplines as parallel packages. We use them as different ways of reading and shaping the same project.
The studio stays deliberately lean at its centre and assembles specialist capability according to scale, geography and brief. That allows us to keep authorship clear while bringing in the right expertise when the project demands it.
Systems, frameworks and management support the work; they are not the work. The objective remains a coherent place, a recognisable identity and an experience that holds together from first decision to final encounter.
How we assemble
A network without the generic network model.
The point is not access to “resources everywhere.” It is the ability to form a precise team around the project: the right disciplines, local knowledge, technical depth and delivery capacity — connected by one design logic.
Expertise is selected.
Architects, designers, engineers, technical specialists, fabricators and local partners are brought in because the project needs them, not because they sit permanently on an organisation chart.
One connected field.
The studio coordinates strategy, spatial design, identity, information and implementation so decisions remain legible across disciplines and through delivery.
Leadership
Nagi El Husseini · Founder & Strategic Design Director
Design leadership across complex environments.
Nagi El Husseini founded HYRAX after more than two decades working across Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Asia. His experience spans hospitality, mixed-use, residential, retail, workplace, healthcare, masterplanning and branded environments.
His role sits between strategy and design: clarifying the problem, structuring multidisciplinary teams, protecting the core idea and carrying it through the practical realities of delivery.
The studio’s research practice extends that approach. Evidence, mapping and AI-assisted synthesis are used to widen the field of inquiry and test assumptions; final design judgment remains human.
Place · Identity · Experience
What stays constant
Different projects. Same discipline.
Context before signature.
The work should belong to its place, people and purpose before it belongs to a studio aesthetic.
Integration before decoration.
Architecture, interiors, identity and wayfinding are strongest when they emerge from one logic rather than being applied sequentially.
Clarity without simplification.
Complexity is not removed for appearances; it is structured so the important relationships become understandable and actionable.
Research without dogma.
Evidence is used to challenge intuition, not replace it. A proposition is valuable because it can be tested, refined or rejected.
Design through delivery.
A strong concept must survive coordination, procurement, fabrication, operations and use — otherwise it has not fully become design.
Working geography
Lisbon · Beirut · Dubai — with project teams and specialist collaborators assembled internationally according to brief, scale and delivery requirements.