Nohá & Karīm’s house, located in their village in the district of Shūf, is almost complete. The couple are planning for Nohá to move back permanently from Qatar to Lebanon, while her husband Karīm relocates to Kuwait. To start our conversation, I ask her if she is excited to finally move into and live in her house.

Although Nohá dreaded starting construction, she gradually felt more stable and later excited about the prospect of a house in the mountains when she started seeing results. So did her sons, who spent a night camping with friends on the concrete roof under the stars seven years into the construction when only the structure was up.

Launching the project took a lot of savings, preparation, and networking. Still, progress on the house is steady: Karīm hired an architect based in Mount-Lebanon—who was referred to him by another family abroad, also in the process of building a remittance house—to make drawings, apply for a building permit, and supervise the building. Karīm, Nohá, and the architect met a few times in person as the construction took off and bonded over their mutual friendships and values. The “contract” they share is a social one: they feel comfortable with him because he is from the same part of the Mountain, and they have common connections, putting the architect’s reputation on the line. After consenting to the job, Karīm and the architect maintain communication, and as the project progresses and the architect proves himself capable, their relationship strengthens.




































Because the house’s construction took a long time, the financial agreements between Karīm and the architect constantly fluctuated. While on the balcony and with Nohá getting ready to serve us tea from the kitchen, Karīm chimes into the conversation to explain the logistics that maintained funding for the construction and payment of the architect.

In the crisis Karim refers to, anyone making money abroad or earning from remittances is at an economic advantage. So, even when the architect is not getting paid, or interruptions halt the construction, he continues working anyway, trusting that Karīm and Nohá will secure his pay. Trust between them goes both ways: sometimes, Karīm and Nohá paid him months ahead, leaving him in charge of paying others involved in the house’s construction. Eventually, after twelve years of constant communication, the family’s business relationship with the architect evolved into a friendship. When Nohá and Karīm host their first gathering in their village house after moving in, they invite the architect and his family.

Just before the gathering, and after a decade and a half of construction, Nohá gets the chance to unpack and arrange the furniture she had been keeping in boxes in Doha, in suitcases moved from Doha to Lebanon, or distributed and stored with different family members—a moment she had been anticipating for a while.

Usually, “furniture and fixtures” are movable pieces that have no permanent connection to the structure of a building. Although they may be specified before a building’s construction, they usually get placed, affixed, or set up after construction has concluded. For Nohá, furniture and fixtures do not come at the end, nor after the architect’s “contract” expires: she kept her belongings in mind as the house was still in progress. As a result, stuff affects the built form: in the living room, where Nohá is pointing at and describing her things to me, she and the architect had measured and outlined a window for a pair of silk curtains she once had hanging in Doha. While in Qatar, Nohá had been mentally planning for and anticipating which objects and pieces of furniture she would leave behind in Doha and which were valuable and meaningful to her that she would take to Lebanon. She sees her time in Qatar as part of a journey that would eventually end with a move back to her homeland and to her homeland house.

To move her belongings from Doha to Qatar, Nohá uses the maximum weight she is allowed to carry on a flight to Beirut. On Qatar Airways, a single piece of checked-in baggage should

weigh no more than 32 kilograms, and the sum of its length, width, and height should not exceed 158 centimeters.“Baggage Allowance,” Qatar Airways.

In diasporic homemaking, subjects consider how heavy, big, and fragile an object is. They also consider maximizing the volume within a suitcase by padding objects with fabrics they might need on their trips. Finally, they plan for which items they will need last in Qatar but first in Lebanon, to prioritize what to pack and take when.

For Nohá, like for other émigrés, bareness is a reminder of one’s recent arrival to a place and of transience away from one’s home country. By deeming decorating and furnishing as essential parts of homemaking, she makes an effort to settle and assert her presence. The moment she gets to create an aesthetic space by collecting her disparate things,

she carves out a place for her family that is no longer governed by diasporic necessity.Hage, The Diasporic Condition, 129.

Once back on the balcony with Karīm, we speak about his family’s generational migration journey and are reminded, as he points to the village which can be seen in its entirety from our spot, that remittance and migration-funded houses are not new.

In the late 19^th century, and after years in the “West,” Lebanese emigrants had accumulated clocks, clothes, and even a few cars that set them apart from those who stayed in the Mountain. Thus, even as they rejected America to return home, these emigrants were nonetheless changed by their years in al-mahjar. Their old abodes were no longer fitting, given their sense of material comfort, nor were they an appropriate reflection of their newfound social status. In many Lebanese villages,

bigger and more distinct dwellings were erected to announce their success.Khater, Inventing Home, 15.

From the balcony, Karīm points opposite the village view to a carved stone voussoir in the stone door frame, inscribed with “N” and “K,” the owners’ initials. It was a gift from the architect that they had only recently noticed. Although Nohá, Karīm, and the architect did not have a fixed contract, the architect has become a fixture in their house.