Salem Charabi smiles a lot. He smiles as he greets you, he smiles when asked a question and he smiles when answering. While doing so, he exposes a charming gap between his front teeth and makes grand hand gestures to illustrate his words. Here, the architect-cum-designer discusses utopian architecture, running your own studio and infusing a bit of where you’re from—in Charabi’s case, Egypt and Denmark—into the things that you create.

When did you learn that you wanted to become an architect?
I’ve always had a curiosity toward spaces and how they can make you feel a certain way. There’s a saying that you forget what people look like and you forget what people say but you never forget how they made you feel. Becoming an architect has been a search to both understand and ultim...