Our Story
Our story · Doha, Qatar
This studio started
in my daughter's eyes.
Not in a business plan. In one quiet evening, a box of kinetic sand, and a memory of clay behind a water tank.
She was happy just looking at me.
One evening, about a year into my mental health journey, I was looking into my daughter's eyes. She was happy. Happy that I was her father, right now, exactly as I was. And in her eyes I saw my own reflection, and something hit me: she's going to grow up. She's going to start understanding things.
I didn't want her to grow up to a father who did everything his family told him to — who became the engineer, and then got depressed because it felt like no one cared when he actually did it. A father who had spent years feeling bullied, feeling like a loser inside a life that looked correct from the outside.
So I decided I needed to work on myself. Whatever it takes.
A grown man, a box of kinetic sand, and a flashback.
I kept digging into the mental health work because I didn't know what else to do. Then one day my therapist told me to get kinetic sand. I refused. Or rather, I said yes and ignored it. For three, four sessions she kept asking, until I caught myself: I had promised to do whatever it takes, and here I was being lazy and too much of a man for a box of sand.
So I bought it and kept it in my office, like she said, for whenever I got stressed or started panicking. The first time I used it, it was fine — I was just bored. Then came a day I was genuinely panicking over a mistake at work, bracing for the disciplinary email, maybe the lecture in my supervisor's office. I took the sand out and started playing.
And the flashback hit. I was a little kid again — the kid who ran from the screaming and the discipline in his father's house, collected the clay that gathered after the rain, and played with it behind the water tank at the back of the house, where nobody could find him.
That's the clay I'm going toward.
I had a vision that I should follow this. Then I saw videos of the pottery wheel and thought: I bet that feels really good. I knew nothing. So from late 2017 to March 2019 I learned everything I could from YouTube, then started hand-building at the Souq Waqif Art Center. In March 2019, I touched the wheel for the first time.
That same year I entered the social entrepreneurship development program at the Social Development Center — and took first place. Then came a trip to Denmark, where I took part in a wood firing. That was the last card. I came back to Qatar certain: I need to bring this here.
Because clay can pull everyone out of their own universe — whatever they're dealing with — and sit us all at one table.
One wheel. One table. A sofa and a laptop.
That's how Ceramic Cube began. I rented a small studio — just me, one wheel, one table, and in the other room a small sofa with a laptop, where I built the website and edited the photos at night.
After a year I moved to a small studio to test the real question: would people actually come to pottery workshops in Qatar? The demand was great. The answer was yes.
The best four years of our lives.
In January 2022 we upgraded to Lusail — much bigger than anything before, and so spacious. What followed were the best four years of our lives: the workshops, the members, the activities, thousands of people sitting down at a wheel for the first time.
Until the people — and the staff — started telling me the same thing: the place is getting tight.
195 square meters for anyone who loves clay.
In June 2026 we moved to Excellence Tower in West Bay — a bigger space, 195 square meters, built for one kind of person: anyone who loves and cares about pottery.
Today that means pottery workshops and wheel classes for beginners, hand-building sessions, studio memberships with kiln access, firing services, and the clay, glaze and tools we use ourselves — the whole ecosystem, under one roof in Doha.
Clay brought me back to myself. The studio exists so it can do the same for you.
— Hameed Al Qahtani, Founder, Ceramic Cube
If you've ever been curious about pottery, or you just need somewhere to put your phone down and make something real — come and visit us at Excellence Tower, West Bay, Doha. The clay is always ready.