Why I Opened a Pottery Studio in Qatar

People ask me this a lot. Usually with a slightly raised eyebrow, as if opening a pottery studio here was either very brave or very naive. Honestly, at the time, it was probably both.

It started in 2019, in a small space I'd rented almost impulsively. I'd been making pottery for a few years by then, mostly as a way to decompress after work, and I'd fallen completely in love with it. Not just the craft itself — the way clay moves, the way it resists you until it doesn't — but the specific kind of quiet it creates. When your hands are in clay, your mind goes somewhere else. All the noise stops.

I kept thinking: why doesn't Qatar have a place where people can experience this? There were art spaces, sure, and the country's cultural scene was growing fast. But a proper, open ceramics studio — somewhere you could just walk in, sit down at a wheel, and make something — I couldn't find one. So I thought, well. Maybe I should.

The first space was tiny. One room, a few wheels, some shelving, a kiln I was terrified of for the first month. I didn't know if anyone would come. This is a place of constant motion — people working long hours, an expat community that can feel transient, a social scene that leans toward the polished and the performative. Would anyone slow down enough to sit with clay for two hours?

They did. Slowly at first, then steadily. People came curious and left transformed — or at least a little softened. A surgeon who needed to use her hands differently. An engineer who'd never made anything physical in his life. A teenager dragged along by her mum who turned out to have a real gift. Each person who walked through the door reinforced what I'd believed from the start: this city needed a place like this.

By January 2022 we'd outgrown the original space and opened the community studio — bigger, better-equipped, designed for people to actually linger and connect. That opening felt like proof that the instinct was right.

I didn't open Ceramic Cube because I ran the numbers and saw a gap in the market. I opened it because I needed it to exist — and I had a hunch others did too. That hunch turned out to be right, and I'm grateful every single day that I acted on it.

— Hameed Al Qahtani
Founder, Ceramic Cube