00:00It starts with a detail, a line, a carving, something shaped by hand.
00:05Every scratch, grain and texture is deliberate.
00:08The hard part is everything when you started doing it, you know, the quality.
00:16Product you pick, time you put. An example is the carving.
00:21Every carving is like, you know, it's just using one tool in his hand.
00:25The second part is the sanding. You have to make it smooth. Not use a machine, you have to use
00:30the hand.
00:31And not only the hand, you have to use the finger. Very manual intent.
00:36Quality is what makes a good product. But who decides what constitutes quality design?
00:41Who decides how our spaces should look like? Us or Global Trends?
00:46A space that you feel comfortable in, that's your space. It represents you, what we understand, interpret what we import.
00:55Designer Karoli Magero decided to fight the global trends by setting a quality standard of his own.
01:02The market in Tanzania is very small. Most of our work are taken outside the country.
01:09You know, so if you want to make money, you have to make custom-made furniture.
01:14Dar es Salaam is growing fast. New buildings and apartments bring with them a rising demand for design.
01:21But much of it follows the same global blueprint.
01:25I've been to places that I feel like, you know, this is not what represents us.
01:31This is not us. This is imported from other places.
01:35Me is, you know, a combination of where I'm from, the culture in the coast, the Swahili culture.
01:41Karoli remains true to his own standards of quality, local and handmade.
01:47It is not an easy process, nor is it a quick one, but it is slowly paying off.
01:52I have not studied design. I'll be, you know, going with my normal life and an idea will come.
02:02And I'll walk around with this idea. I explain to my carpenter, I explain to the details, like this is
02:10how I want to put it.
02:11So I draw this, I sketch, and, you know, and then I sit down with my main carpenter and then
02:18they create it.
02:19We use teacard wood. It's from the farm. So it's good also for environment.
02:22We don't go and use like a tree from the forest.
02:26Also we use recycled material. So we use coffee jute bags that have been used to ship coffee from north
02:38of Tanzania.
02:39And also we use wood from the boat, from the dow.
02:43So the dow, they've been selling in the Indian Ocean for a long time and then they break.
02:48We work with the fabric that are made in Tanzania.
02:52Layer by layer, these everyday materials are transformed into something new, yet strangely familiar.
02:58And it is precisely through his personal style that Karoli strikes a chord.
03:04So I was born an artist, you know, I used to paint, draw.
03:09And so I have always had this design way of looking at things.
03:12Mostly people from outside, they really, you know, saw it as something really unique.
03:20They understood the design and also they accept it.
03:23From, you know, Brazil, different places in the US, Canada, Italy, you've been there.
03:30India, Australia, and of course around Africa, you know, Kenya.
03:35What started in Dar es Salaam is now being seen around the world.
03:39And as the city grows, so does the question of what it should look like.
03:44The youth of Dar es Salaam, we give them a chance to design a future.
03:47First, I'm confident they're going to do the designing of the future.
03:51There is a lot of creativity, that's for sure.
03:54You don't need to copy the West to have style.
03:57Dar es Salaam has its own vocabulary and Karoli is helping to bring it back.
04:03Most of our material, they are not used for furniture.
04:06And so I go out of the way, you have to go to a crazy career call to find.
04:11And once you know what is holding the room together, the labor, the memory, the refusal to copy,
04:17the space stops reading the same name.
04:20We designed something special.
04:22I designed something that I like it a lot.
04:25I make things for me.
04:27As a result, we get that wow effect.
04:30So people like a lot.
04:31That also, you know, drives me to keep on doing this.
04:34But my goal was I want to have an opportunity to show my designing out there for the whole world
04:41to see.
04:43Karoli does not just design furniture.
04:45He designs a different way of seeing space and a quiet shift led not by trends, but by intention.
04:52There is.
04:54Since we are saying where we all need membership.
04:55On the bookshank愿ie.
04:56That's Right.
04:56It's Rey's story we need open with right there.
04:57Here is our blend here.
04:57She has aLA.
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