A Room that Remembers

The brief to our designers was short: no safari motifs, no imported masks on the wall, no gold for gold's sake. African heritage without a costume.

What we landed on instead was structural — timber screens instead of printed pattern, a material palette of clay, charcoal and brass, and lighting that behaves the way lighting behaves in a home kitchen at dusk rather than a stage set.

The test we kept coming back to: would this room still make sense with the food taken away? If the answer was yes, we knew it was architecture, not decoration.