HodHod turns Egypt's street carts into furniture (interview with Howayda Abouheif)

Egypt celebrates its Pharaonic, Coptic and Islamic design past but ignores its living street heritage — the painted fuul carts, calligraphed trucks and decorated tuktuks still working every day.

Don't imitate the folk art, use the originals: decommissioned karro carts become furniture with their paint, charms and children's names intact.

In a CairoScene interview, founder Howayda Abouheif recalls tracking carts owner to owner through alleyways and villages, restoring good ones whole or splitting them into parts — a wooden wheel becomes a tea table, fragments become chairs, mirrors, towel hangers.

HodHod launched in June 2026 and sells through a handful of Cairo and North Coast retailers; its premise reframes working street objects as design material rather than scrap.

In a CairoScene interview published October 8, 2026, television producer Howayda Abouheif describes how HodHod — named after the hoopoe bird — began in June 2026 with a simple want: a coffee table for her garden, made from an old 'karro', the wooden horse- or donkey-drawn cart long used by Egypt's street vendors. She had long collected 'shaabi' vernacular street art, and her years abroad, including in Italy, pushed her to ask how these distinctly Egyptian objects might sit in contemporary interiors.

Her starting observation, as she puts it: Egypt looks to its Pharaonic, Coptic and Islamic past for design, 'but we really don't look at this cultural heritage as something of value... maybe because it's still living in the streets today'. The carts are records of their users, she recalls — his hopes, even his children's names — yet motorised tricycles have made them impractical and rubber wheels displace wooden ones. Rather than imitate the look, HodHod works with originals: some karros need only minor restoration; others are broken down, since 'you can make a hundred pieces out of it'.

The pieces sell through a handful of Cairo and North Coast retailers, and Abouheif describes the work as 'not furniture... it's like putting a painting up'. She is already planning the same treatment for old fuul carts, Alexandria's ice-cream carts and Nile rowing boats — keeping, in every case, the marks the objects already carry.

Egypt's design culture reveres ancient heritage while overlooking the decorated working objects still in daily use on its streets.

The originals carry irreplaceable records — paintwork, charms, children's names — that an imitation would erase.

Motorised tricycles and rubber wheels are sending the carts out of service, making restoration a way to keep the record.

One cart yields many pieces, so the brand can scale output without fabricating new 'folk' objects.

Heritage needn't be excavated: objects still working the streets carry design value — use them whole, marks and all, instead of imitating the style.

The brand is in its earliest days but already looking past the karro to fuul carts, Alexandria ice-cream carts and Nile rowing boats. Abouheif hopes the work nudges people to experiment with the colours and traditions already around them instead of defaulting to Western standards of what is fashionable.