News
Words_Aylin Mustafa
UAE-based Datecrete Studio & Lab has been named one of three recipients of the designboom Special Prize at the 2026 Seoul Design Award, marking a significant achievement for the independent design and material research studio founded by Sara Farha and Khaled Shalkha. The prize recognises Datecrete, their patent-pending architectural material developed using discarded date pits without cement or petrochemical resins. The achievement comes alongside the studio’s shortlisting in two categories at the 2026 Dezeen Awards, Material Innovation and Sustainable Design.
For the married duo, the recognition carries the weight of years spent experimenting with something most people would hardly give a second thought.
“Being selected among the 40 finalists for the Seoul Design Award is something we are incredibly proud of. We have always felt that, although Datecrete comes from a very particular material and regional context, the ideas behind it are universal,” the founders say in a statement shared with ICON MENA.
For Sara and Khaled, receiving one of the three designboom Special Prizes feels especially personal. “Designboom is a platform we have known and followed for a long time, so for them to recognise a small independent studio like ours feels very special,” they share.
And the idea itself began rather unexpectedly.
As the founders recalled in an earlier interview with Objects Objects Objects, Khaled accidentally stepped on a date pit and compared the pain to stepping on a Lego. We all know that pain a little too well. An ordinary, rather unpleasant experience, but one that left him wondering how something so small could be quite so hard. And more importantly, whether that same hardness could be put to use.
“Datecrete started with a very simple question: what could we make from something that was otherwise being thrown away?” the founders explain.
Long before the awards and architectural installations, there were experiments in a kitchen and garage. Spice grinders, seeds left to dry beneath the sun, different mixtures and binders. Some samples crumbled almost immediately, while others took far too long to cure. Their early investigations eventually developed into a material research practice combining Sara’s background in urban planning with Khaled’s expertise in chemical engineering.
The process itself is intriguingly tactile. Date pits collected from local processing facilities are dried and ground into a fine powder before being mixed with a specially developed natural binder, then cast and cured into solid forms. There are hands at almost every stage. Hands sorting, measuring, mixing, moulding and carefully refining something that once belonged inside a fruit.
We often admire a finished object for its beauty, but knowing the labour behind it can make us look at it entirely differently. Especially when that object is a sculptural chair, a textured architectural panel or a floor tile that began its life as agricultural waste.
And the results are no longer confined to the studio. At Expo 2025 Osaka, 35 tonnes of handmade Datecrete pavers were installed across the landscape of the UAE Pavilion, Earth to Ether. Some carried warm Sienna shades, while others incorporated fibres from palm fronds.
Imagine that. A seed small enough to disappear into the palm of your hand, now beneath thousands of feet.
And perhaps the idea isn’t as unfamiliar as it first appears. What makes Datecrete particularly interesting is that its creators looked towards regional building knowledge while developing a contemporary material. Long before Portland cement became commonplace, palm fronds, trunks and fibres were essential to construction across the Gulf. Traditional Arish-houses relied on the tree for shelter and structure. Palm materials were never merely decorative. They were part of the house itself.
There is, after all, a certain generosity to the date palm. It stands beneath the unforgiving desert sun, its fronds offering shade and its fruit nourishment. For centuries, the tree has found its way into our lives, through religion, literature and the smallest domestic rituals. Even its seeds were once roasted and ground into traditional kohl and used in medicinal preparations. Almost every part of the tree had something to give.
Its presence extends into the imagination of poets and storytellers, too. In Iraqi poet Badr Shakir al Sayyab’s Rain Song, the eyes of a beloved are likened to palm forests at dawn. The tree has long carried associations of endurance, beauty and belonging, surviving the harshness of its surroundings while continuing to provide for those living among it.
Sara and Khaled’s work is one example. What began with a discarded seed and years of trial and error has now caught the attention of the international design community. Beyond the recognition itself, there is the satisfaction of seeing an idea that once existed only as a possibility finally take shape.
“It gives us confidence that the work, and all the effort behind it, is connecting in the way we hoped it would,” the founders share.
The sustainable material Sara and Khaled have created is an achievement in itself, but there is something equally fascinating about the curiosity that brought them here. Their willingness to question what we think we already know, to see potential in something so familiar that we pass it countless times a day without a second glance, and to dedicate years to figuring out how that possibility could find its place in the spaces we inhabit.
