8 ★ FT Weekend 4 April/5 April 2020
Y
ou argue on it, you fight on
it. But, most powerfully, you
think on it.”
Yinka Ilori — 33, British-
Nigerian and one of the
world’s most in-demand designers, all
high energy and rapid-fire annunciation
— is explaining why he and his peers are
in the habit of endlessly
reworking chairs.
Theyare,hesays,more
than just furniture. “You
trust a chair to hold so much
detail, so much emotion.
Objects have the power to
do that.” Does he mean that
chairs carry the imprints of
human souls? “Exactly!” he
says, lunging from his own
chair to arm-chop the table
in front of him. “Some are
broken — or look like they
have been. If a chair could
tell your personal secrets,
well that would be just crazy.”
Ilori — celebrated for his saturated
colours, colliding cultural references
and buried narratives — began his
career a decade ago by reimagining bro-
ken and abandoned chairs and turning
them into art objects. His style emerged
instinctively, he says, from his struggle
to make sense of his place as a young
Briton with west African heritage. His
studio, which opened in 2015, was
backed by his entrepreneurial streak
(“All Nigerians are natural entrepre-
neurs”). Today, his pieces of rejected
furniture transformed have given way
to work on a grander scale.Ilori’s design work can be found in
whole interiors for upmarket fashion
stores including Mira Mikati; setting the
look at festivals including 2019 Cannes
Lions; and in lounge areas — what he
calls “adult playgrounds” — in hotels and
property developments in Asia and the
Middle East. He even designed a recent
“ident” for ITV and a
Christmas tree for the lux-
ury Sanderson hotel in
London’s Fitzrovia.
But it is not all glitz. He
has also worked on furniture
projects with recovering
addicts, and municipal
authorities and railway net-
works hire him to bring
flashes of Lagos brilliance to
grey public spaces — a skate
park in Lille, a pedestrian
tunnel in Battersea. Talk-
ing to the FT in his west
London studio two
weeks before Covid-19 brought global
economies to near standstill, Ilori was
riding high. Had the 2020 Salone design
fair not been postponed, his work would
have been around every corner in Milan.
Why does the luxury industry want to
work with him? “To stop them making a
mistake,” he says. “Brands want to look
cool, but they are also aware of the risk of
being accused of cultural appropriation.
They want that difference, and they
come to us to help them pull it off.” Does
he mind? “Not at all. They’re not stealing
it. They’re paying for it properly.”
Ilori is also the man who last year
plonked his Colour Palace — an Afro-rounds of the Georgian gallery. The
10m-high work, designed in collabora-
tion with Pricegore architects, was cho-
sen by public vote after being short-
listed by a panel of experts.
But not everyone appreciated it. One
public figure, whose name Ilori says he
cannot remember, sent an email of pro-
test to the architects. “He said, Sir John
Soane [the neoclassical gallery’s masterarchitect] was a man of respect...and
something, something...andIfeelthe
Colour Palace does not share the
attributes and values of Soane.”
What did Ilori think he meant by that?
“That it was not good enough,” he fires.
“That it was not a good enough Colour
Palace, it did not belong there. And he
said it would be better off in a Lagos
shanty town.”
Does he often come up against such
racism? “Yes. But I thought the email
was interesting, because it’s funny how
people feel like they have ownership of a
space, that architecture can make them
feel elitist, and that they can dictate
what belongs there. The fact that a tem-
porary structure made him feel so
uncomfortable is amazing.”
Anyway, as Ilori points out drily,
Soane — architect of the Bank of Eng-
land — was a polymath: a universal trav-
eller and international collector.What mattered more than spluttering
outrage from one objector, says Ilori,
was the pavilion’s signal. “Having the
Colour Palace in that space allowed
someone like myself, and others from
Brixton or Peckham or Hackney to say,
OK, you know what? I can come to the
Dulwich Picture Gallery and feel like I
belong here, because I’m a Londoner.
“Why should I feel like I don’t
belong?”
A career in design, he says, helped
him forge his own belonging, and much
of his work deals with processing his-
tory. Ilori, one of four children, grew up
on a local-authority estate in Islington,
north London, the son of a retail man-
ager father and an entrepreneurial
mother — “very traditional” Nigerian
parents, who arrived in the UK in the
early 1980s.
“They wanted to give us a different
opportunity. I think to myself, would I
do that now? Leave your entire life to
give your unborn children that uncondi-
tional love? Because it’s a huge ask.”
His parents wanted him to be an engi-
neer (“Nigerian families tell you what
you have to be”). But his mother’s trav-
els to Europe to buy Swiss voile lace and
Dutch wax-printed fabrics — the colour-
ful stuff of west African clothing —Yinka Ilori in
hiswest London
studio: ‘If a chair
could tell your
secrets, that
would be crazy’;
(left) ‘A Trapped
Star’ (2015)
Vivek Vadoliya for the FT;
Veerle EvensWhen a chair
bares its soul
Design|YinkaIlorireimaginesoldfurniture,
saturatingitinthecoloursofhisNigerianheritage,
toexplorebelongingandrace.ByHelenBarrett
House Home
futurist-style temporary pavilion of
Nigerian-influenced shapes and hues —
on the clipped lawns of the Dulwich Pic-
ture Gallery, in one of the most genteel
districts of London.
It was, he concedes, a friendly provo-
cation: the pavilion's aesthetic was
closer to the African shops and street
markets of Peckham, a poorer suburb
two miles to the east, than the quiet sur-‘Onepublicfigurethought
theworkdidnotbelong
there.HesaiditwouldbebetterinaLagosshantytown’
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