Feyza Kemahlioglu was born in Istanbul and educated here in the States so it makes perfect sense that her work now, designing and manufacturing her own collections of home decor through her company FEYZ Studio, would meld the two. Her roots are apparent in each piece — sculptural lighting, glassware and furniture — but so is her training as an architect. The old is sampled, interpreted and modernized.

“I wanted to take something traditional and make it contemporary, make it a new thing,” Feyza said when she first decided she wanted to explore product design. With that as her brief, she and her mother were shopping at the Grand Bazaar when they saw the tobacco pipes, carved from clay excavated from a specific area of Turkey, and the idea for one of her first lighting pieces — the Pillars of Meerschaum — sprang to life. “These are all made to order and are very sculptural — and I love that I am never making the same thing twice.”

Feyza got her bachelor’s at Carnegie Mellon and her master’s in architecture and urban design at Columbia, but she knew early on that she wanted to make things. She first started selling her glass vases at Bergdorf’s and to retailers around the country; she is also represented by the Wexler Gallery in Philly for her lighting. She expanded recently to table top decor and furniture as well.

Almost all of her products are made here or in Turkey — she is often on-site for at the glassblower she uses in Brooklyn, where the design is more of a collaboration with the craftsmen, she says, rather than a top-down order.

And while the initial years of her business (she started in 2016) were challenging, the pandemic gave her a chance to think about the next steps and get a lot of design work completed. (She also had her first child, a son, Eren, who was born in March 2020.)

She now has two parts of the company — custom installations and retail. And while she always imagined herself going back to Turkey, she now hopes the company’s future involves keeping one foot in each country. Case in point: she describes her new collection of table linens as “the comfort of American jeans combined with Turkish ornament.”

FEYZ Studio
265 Canal Street Suite 215
Monday to Friday 9a to 5p
412 979 1638
feyza@feyzstudio.com