Riyadh shoppers with a taste for fine home textiles now have a new address. Antoine Karam, the family-run luxury linen house founded in Beirut in 1968, has opened a boutique at Solitaire Mall, the Saudi capital's newest retail and lifestyle destination.
The brand is no stranger to the Kingdom. It has served Saudi clients since 2019 through its Mansard Hotel boutique, building a devoted following that includes royal families and private patrons commissioning pieces for palaces, private residences and diplomatic homes. The Solitaire Mall store extends that reach, putting the label's bed, bath and table linens plus home accessories in front of a wider Riyadh clientele.
What sets the house apart is how much of the process stays in one pair of hands. Everything is made in its own Beirut atelier, where more than 60 artisans handle design, embroidery and production. That setup allows unusually deep personalisation — clients choose the fabric, colour, embroidery, design, size and finishing details — and fast turnaround on made-to-order pieces. Materials come courtesy of a long-standing partnership with Italian weaver Martinelli Ginetto, all OEKO-TEX Standard 100 certified, so Lebanese embroidery skills meet Italian textiles in every item.
The backstory is a classic family enterprise. Antoine and Sonia Karam started with a single embroidery machine and a small team of craftswomen in 1968. Over five decades the business has grown into a specialist luxury linen house while remaining family-owned, with later generations now steering design and regional expansion. Beyond Lebanon and Saudi Arabia, the brand operates in Kuwait, Qatar and Abidjan in Côte d'Ivoire.
For travellers, the opening is a signal of where Riyadh's retail scene is heading. Solitaire Mall is positioning itself as a lifestyle destination rather than a plain shopping centre, and the arrival of a bespoke atelier brand — the kind of shop you'd more expect in Beirut, Paris or Milan — fits the city's broader push to court luxury buyers as tourism and entertainment open up. If you're furnishing a home, hunting a wedding gift with real substance, or simply curious about craftsmanship, it's worth a browse: you can watch a design take shape around your own space rather than pick off a shelf. Anthony Karam, representing the family's next generation, frames it plainly: every creation starts with the client, and the atelier's job is to bring that vision to life.
Whether you're passing through Riyadh or living there, the new boutique offers a rare thing in modern retail — a workshop-to-shop model where the person stitching your monogram works for the same house that sold it to you.
Original source: Breaking Travel News
