Born in Italy, an artist and writer who moved to Kuwait upon marrying Khalifa Qattan. Beginning in 1972 she single-handedly transformed their family home into a complete work of art, working intermittently for over three decades until its completion in 2006. She still lives in the house and personally guides every tour.
A pioneer of the Kuwaiti art movement and the first Kuwaiti artist to hold a solo exhibition, in 1953. His paintings fill the first-floor galleries, with themes including “The Egg”, “Evolution”, “The Apple”, “Women I Saw”, and “The Prophesy”, his meditation on the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and its aftermath.
While Khalifa was in Washington, D.C. for his first exhibition in the United States, held for the opening of the Kuwaiti Embassy, Lidia wanted to surprise him, as she loved to do when he travelled. She found a bookshelf he had built that needed painting, but there was no paint in the house. Instead, she covered it with the pieces of a mirror she had kept after their three-year-old daughter accidentally broke it. Khalifa came home amazed. That bookshelf was the first green light.
Lidia began covering the walls and doors with mirror-clad wooden panels, partly so her young daughter Jalila could draw on them freely. Whatever Jalila wrote on the mirror, Lidia could simply wipe clean.
A termite mound discovered in the main living room, today's Planet Earth Hall, destroyed much of the mirror structure. The project had to be reworked from the beginning.
Lidia spent three years developing a way to set mirror mosaic directly onto the walls: mixing her own materials and learning the exact timing of cleaning each fragment before the filler putty hardened. Nobody taught her; there was nobody to ask.
Working in intervals for two decades, Lidia covered the house, its floors, walls, ceilings, and doors, completing the final rooms after the rear part of the house was built in 2004 and 2005.
The first floor becomes a permanent gallery of both artists' work.
The only one of its kind in the world.
The Mirror House
Every fragment catches a different light
The ground floor is the mirror house itself, a series of themed halls where every surface carries a meaning: Planet Earth Hall, Zodiac Hall, Universe Hall, Knowledge Hall, My World Hall, the Corridor of the Nations, the Shark Basin, Sea World Hall, and the Stairs to Inspiration. The first floor is the Qattan's Art Gallery, showing Khalifa's paintings alongside Lidia's own galleries: Art Therapy, Women and Society, Experimental, The Art of Recycling, and The Galaxy Journey. Tours end at the small shop, where Lidia's paintings, sculptures, jewellery, and books can be purchased, one of the ways visitors help keep the house alive.
The Mirror House has been featured in television programs and documentaries from Europe, America, China, and across the Middle East, and in local and international press since the 1970s. It is consistently listed among Kuwait's most beloved cultural destinations.