My favorite business book that I read/listen to at least once a year is The Hard Thing About Hard Things, that Ben Horowitz wrote reflecting on his experience as a startup founder. As the title suggests, the journey described is by no means an easy, smooth or in any way rational one. His narrative, emotions and experiences explicitly named as difficult as they are, provides me with reassurance that others have walked this path before and that feeling it is this hard is, in fact, ok. 

When 2011 came around, I was a mother with two young girls, taking my first steps towards establishing my own architectural design practice and working through my Master’s program. Busy time indeed. The overhaul that ensued touched every aspect of life; personal, professional, social and spiritual in addition of course to political and economic. A couple of years in, wrapping up the program, I began working on my Thesis project which required the Adaptive Reuse of a significant building in my city. The concept intrigued me; this Adaptive Reuse meant renovating existing buildings to accommodate new uses as the most effective of all approaches to Green Design. I had studied and sat for the LEED GA, but was at loss about how it could actually help a country like Egypt tackle sustainability in the built environment. It was just too expensive and too technically-sophisticated. This Adaptive Reuse sounded like a plausible, more realistic approach that might actually make a difference. 

It also resonated with something I had noticed in my budding practice: my absolute favorite projects, the ones I got all excited about, were usually renovations, transformations, of buildings or spaces, not new builds. The “here is a vacant piece of land in Tagamo, please build us a villa ya bashmohandesa” projects didn’t cut it for me. I intensely enjoyed figuring things out, finding my way around limitations, and aspects of renovations.   

For my Thesis project, I selected the Egyptian Museum of Antiquities in Tahrir square, which we knew at the time would be mostly vacated when the GEM opens, with no plans for it use announced till then. I envisioned a museum for the History of Modern Egypt, Mohamed Ali onwards, with the building also housing a media library/cultural center and a memorial commemorating those who died on Jan 25. 

While developing that, I started to face partnership challenges at work, which resulted in the dissolution of the company. Thinking of my next steps required reflecting on what had gone wrong and I came to the realization that one of the factors was that I had become drained by a particular type of work, which was private homes. Those projects were endless it seemed, fraught with irrationality and lacking boundaries, objectives and objectivity. One could argue that is fair as one’s private home may well reflect their human condition, which probably lacks all of the above as well. However, I had had it. I wanted to design and bring to market ready-made homes that residents would find comfortable and fulfilling of our universal needs. To me, this sounded more like a real-estate developer than an architect. Yet I felt I would bring my own design lens to it that would result in a unique outcome. And how to compete with the Emaar’s and SODIC’s of the world? Well, they had their landbanks of hundreds of acres in the desert; I would have my curated properties in city center locations that exuded liveliness and character. Who could compete with my renovated, high-ceiling, Zamalek penthouse with a Nile view, I thought? I began touring locations with brokers and trying to figure out how to secure my first asset. I certainly didn’t have the dispensable cash to make such a purchase and knew very little about finance or investment at the time to consider alternative routes.  

In fall of 2015, a couple of months after I had defended my thesis, I visited NYC and stayed at an Airbnb for the first time. Interesting concept that was easy enough to set up in Cairo.. wasn’t it? All I needed was to find property owners that would be convinced of the idea, and I wouldn’t have to own the properties myself. I would then list them on Airbnb so people would find them and book them. Only problem was I didn’t know that many people that owned nice properties in Zamalek who would give them to a solo.. person. 

That’s right. Since I had left my previous company, for nearly a year I hadn’t started something else, had no legal entity, no team; it was just me, doing very little. There was no point approaching anyone, property owner or not, while in this dismal state. I had to get my act together first. December of 2015, Design Dialogue was born and I began to restart my career in architecture and interior design. The following years were super busy, building a team and a portfolio of projects, once again maneuvering a partner dissolution, this time however much better prepared, there was hardly a glitch. I had moved office to the Greek Campus, THE ultimate Adaptive Reuse model in Cairo, and every few months my big idea would force itself into my sightline.

I would ask myself when am I going to do that? When will it come to life? Never had much time to dwell on these questions though, as I hustled to keep my practice growing. We were a small team, tiny in fact, but we stretched ourselves ridiculously and I learned to open my eyes and jump, say yes, no matter how afraid I was. We completed the full transformation of a less-than-sexy 3000sqm residential building in Heliopolis into a modern-day office building, starting from rebranding the company, all the way to artwork selection, with every design, supervision and procurement decision in between, delivered in less than 18 months. It was a staggering feat for my team, a turning point, that earned us our very first award for design. What’s more, I had enjoyed it tremendously, invigorated, not drained, by the challenges the renovation brought up. I now had clarity on my niche.

Life has its ways and only a couple of months after that building was completed, COVID hit, with all that entailed. A pause, the first opportunity to reflect since the stop in 2015, and realizing that some things may need to change, both personally and at work. While mulling over these, I became aware of a company that had started operating short-term rentals in Cairo. I got PISSED! Big time!! MY IDEA had been stolen (of course not. They had just beaten me to it). I felt like such a loser for having shuffled my feet for six years, not doing anything about it because I had been so hung up about how it was absolutely a must that my first property was in Zamalek overlooking the Nile.

I had a light-bulb moment that had eluded me for all those years: I could start where I have a network of property owners that would trust me with their properties. That was in Tagamo. I wrestled with the idea: does this “count” as Adaptive Reuse? Well, it’s Use at least I told myself. I had visited properties with friends and family members who’d had them for sometimes 10 years, still unfinished, just sitting there, not eating or drinking as many are so fond of saying. I thought to myself, I can set up the model here, run it, learn from it, build a track record we can jump from when tackling more challenging neighborhoods and owners.

The proposal for my network of family/friends property owners was: you will cover the cost of finishing/furnishing your own property, we will design it and handle the whole process, then will operate it as a short-term rental on our website and Airbnb. No investment on their part in the new company that I named KENNAH, no risk on their part as every pound paid is in their own asset. And if it didn’t work, they could always sell or rent out in the traditional sense. I got buy-in from 3 owners and we were good to go. On January 1st 2022, seven KENNAH properties in Tagamo went live.