Meet the Founder
Owner and Design principal
Abdulaziz Khalid Al Tayyash is the owner and Design Principal of A1Architects and ZAZA Maison. He is a Chartered Member of RIBA, an International Associate Member of AIA, and holds professional credentials including CAIE, PMP, and LEED. His work brings together architecture, design, art, and culture, enabling him to shape projects that move beyond the built form to express the depth of Saudi identity. Through this interdisciplinary approach, he seeks to establish a globally resonant design language rooted in heritage, refined through contemporary aesthetics, and positioned as a cultural expression of a renewed Saudi identity.
He never loved architecture the way it is usually taught. He loved it on his own terms. For Abdulaziz, architecture is not only walls, programs, and drawings, it is movement, intention, and presence. He is drawn to precision and tension: the speed of a football skill, the control of a karate strike, the way a swimmer cuts through water, the way a butterfly changes direction without apology.
He studies those moments of motion and asks: if that moment could be held and lived inside, what would it feel like? His work is the attempt to give form to that question. He treats architecture as language, not style but a way to state values, identity, discipline, and memory.
A1Architects Consultation (A1A) is one expression of that language. Under his direction, the work proceeds project by project, he reads not only the site and the brief but the cultural weight of what is being built. He approaches towers, private homes, workspaces, studios regardless of scale with the same expectation: every space must carry meaning, not only function. He moves through architecture, interior design, and art direction as a single act, building systems that can be delivered with technical clarity but that still carry emotional depth. His aim is not to produce buildings that are just efficient or impressive; his aim is to leave work that alters how a place is understood.
ZAZA Maizon is the other expression, more instinctive, more personal. ZAZA is where he allows narrative, culture, and object to merge. A girl. A horse. A hunt. A fold of the shemagh becoming a chair. The quiet of cooled lava becoming a desk. The work is collectible, but it is not decoration. It comes from his own education as an architect and his own reading of daily life in this region: how people sit, host, work, rest, display, protect, remember. Serious craft expressed as quiet magic.
