Words by Allegra Salvadori
For ten days this November, Cairo is not just hosting a design week, it is becoming one. From November 20 to 29, Cairo Design Week 2025 returns with its most expansive edition yet, stretching across three key districts – Heliopolis, Zamalek, and Downtown – and positioning the Egyptian capital as one of the region’s most compelling design maps.
Inspired by Socrates’ phrase “Speak, so I can see you,” this edition’s theme, “Design, So I Can See You,” treats design as a language of presence. Not as decoration or styling, but as a way of saying: this is who we are, this is what we value, this is how we want to be seen.
Across the city, installations, exhibitions, and brand experiences turn architecture into a backdrop for identity – personal, collective, and urban. It is less about staging a fair and more about choreographing a series of encounters between Cairo’s heritage and its contemporary creative pulse.
Heliopolis – Where Memory Becomes a “Second Skin”
In 2025, Heliopolis emerges as the beating heart of Cairo Design Week. Its Art Deco façades, Neo-Islamic villas, and wide boulevards host a programme that treats the neighbourhood as both archive and laboratory.
Under the curatorial theme “Second Skin,” shaped by photographer and interior architect Karim El Hayawan alongside Nehal Leheta, co-founder and Design Director of Design Point, Heliopolis becomes a reflection on texture and memory – how cities accumulate layers, and how design can gently reveal what lies beneath them. Exhibitions unfold inside historic residences and palaces, allowing visitors to read the city’s architectural surfaces almost like skin: marked, lived-in, and constantly renewed.
Heliopolis also hosts some of the week’s most forward-looking platforms. At Ghurnata Palace, the Fashion Design District (FDD), presented by celebrity stylist Mai Galal in collaboration with Maison Pyramide, draws a line between fashion, image-making, and cultural storytelling. Nearby, Showland introduces the Makerspace Exhibition, a dynamic arena for universities, start-ups, workshops, and experimental practices, presented by Creative Districts with Studio 34 and curated by Base Studios. Together, these initiatives frame Heliopolis not just as a backdrop, but as a testing ground where Cairo’s next design language is being prototyped.
Zamalek – “In Between Islands” and States of Mind
Across the Nile, Zamalek shifts the tempo. The island’s leafy streets, embassies and cultural institutions host a quieter, more introspective chapter of Cairo Design Week. The district’s theme, “In Between Islands,” curated by architect and creative director Hala Saleh, founder of TDF+, is less about geography and more about thresholds – between movement and stillness, sound and silence, tradition and experimentation.
Here, venues such as Aisha Fahmy Palace, the Islamic Ceramics Museum, and the Greater Cairo Library are reimagined as sensory landscapes. Exhibitions invite visitors to slow down, to listen to materials and atmospheres: a textile that muffles sound, a piece of furniture that frames a view, a light installation that turns circulation into choreography. Zamalek becomes a sanctuary of sorts – a place to reconsider how design can host contemplation in a city that rarely stands still.
Downtown – Toward a More Human Design Language
If Heliopolis is about memory and Zamalek about balance, Downtown Cairo is where Cairo Design Week looks squarely at the future of urban life. Hosting the festival for the second year in a row, Downtown activates Belle Époque buildings, courtyards, rooftops and the restored Tamara Building, treating the historic centre as a live case study in how cities can evolve without erasing their past.
Curated by designer and artist Karim Mekhtigian, founder of Alchemy Design Studio, the district’s theme “Toward a More Human Design Language” asks a deceptively simple question: what happens when design begins not with form, but with empathy? Exhibitions and interventions here foreground care, context and continuity – how a street-level façade can foster a sense of welcome, how small-scale interventions can soften an overwhelming urban condition, how public furniture, signage and lighting can reintroduce kindness into a dense city fabric.
Beyond the Map: Talks, Walks, and New Rituals of Looking
Beyond its district narratives, Cairo Design Week 2025 extends into a programme that deliberately blurs the boundaries between professional fair, cultural festival and urban classroom. At the Islamic Ceramics Museum, the CDW Stage hosts talks, panels and workshops that draw together regional and international voices around urban innovation, design ethics, craft, sustainability and technology – positioning Cairo not only as a site of production, but as a place where design is rigorously debated.
For the first time, the festival introduces the Design Walk Initiative in collaboration with Barefoot: guided tours that stitch together history, architecture and contemporary practice. These walks lead visitors through key sites in each district, turning navigation itself into a curatorial experience and encouraging a slower, more attentive way of inhabiting the city.
A constellation of partners – from media platforms like MO4/SceneHome, Maison Pyramide, Designboom and ArchDaily to tech, textile, lighting and content collaborators – underscores how Cairo Design Week has grown into an ecosystem rather than a single event, catalysing conversations that extend well beyond the 10-day programme.
As founder and CEO Hisham Mahdy notes, each district of Cairo Design Week tells a different story, but together they form one citywide portrait of Cairo’s creative spirit – a reminder that visibility begins with presence, and that design is one of the most powerful ways to say “we are here.”
Cairo Design Week 2025 runs from 20–29 November across Heliopolis, Zamalek and Downtown Cairo. For tickets, programme details and maps, visit cairodesignweek.net and follow @cairo.design.week.
