Our Story

A workshop,

kept alive.

workshop 63 is a contemporary design atelier where the quiet precision of the past meets new explorations in stainless steel.

Ahmed Abdulla Alkhaja

The Foundations

I.

Awal Refrigeration and Air Conditioning.

Ahmed Abdulla Alkhaja established his workshop with a quiet conviction in the value of precision, patience, and honest craftsmanship. Guided by an innate curiosity for how things are made and how they endure, he began his career working directly with his hands, cultivating a rigorous technical understanding of air conditioning and refrigeration systems through practice rather than abstraction.

His early work took him across Saudi Arabia before returning to Bahrain, where he founded his first workshops in Muharraq and later near Al-Fadhel Mosque in Manama. What began as modest working spaces gradually expanded into larger industrial facilities in Sitra and Mina Salman, reflecting both the growth of the enterprise and the trust it had earned over time.

Yet even as the scale of the work evolved, the process remained deeply personal. Ahmed continued to sketch, test, assemble, and refine with meticulous attention, approaching each project as an act of continuous adjustment until every detail reached a sense of balance and clarity. This commitment to craft, discipline, and technical excellence became the foundation of Awal Refrigeration and Air Conditioning, a company shaped not only through industry, but through a sustained culture of making.

Beginning with little more than technical skill, determination, and an instinct for making, he built more than a company. He established a lasting foundation of craft, resilience, and disciplined ingenuity that continues to inform the way we think, design, and work today.

II.

workshop 63 carries this legacy forward, not as nostalgia, but as an evolving practice of making.

Led by the next generation, the studio operates between archive and atelier. Early pieces from the original workshop are revisited, restored, and released as part of an ongoing archival series, forming the first phase of a broader body of work rooted in fabrication, experimentation, and material inquiry. Alongside these works, new pieces in stainless steel are developed through an iterative process of sketching, prototyping, assembly, and refinement.

workshop 63 is ultimately a space for testing ideas, exchanging knowledge, and extending the culture of making established by our grandfather. Each collection emerges through close engagement with process and material, embracing the precision, discipline, and inventiveness required to work with stainless steel. What begins as an archive continues forward as a platform for new explorations, future collaborations, and evolving forms of production.

Our Practice

Past and present shaped through the same language of craft.

See the
collection.

Browse the full archival collection, coupes, teacups, hammered bowls, plates and trays.

Open the catalog →