At Design Week Lagos 2025, These 7 Designers Created Powerful Stories

On a balmy Wednesday evening, a horde of guests piles into the bare-walled halls of Nahous, in upscale Victoria Island, Lagos. It’s the official party for Design Week Lagos, a week-long event celebrating African design and innovative design practices. Everywhere the eyes can meet, there is an impressive arrangement of designs, varying in form and ambition and ranging from furniture to tableware, rugs to light fixtures. These designs, as has come to be expected with Design Week Lagos, are artisanal, narrative-driven pieces that subvert yet integrate seamlessly into the evolving language of African design. Each piece of design, from a bench designed to resemble a fish bone to a chair with a back made out of strings, mimicking a ukulele, tells a story, highlights a personal ethos, or furthers a collective agenda.

“Design Week Lagos is more than just a festival, it’s an ecosystem,” Titi Ogufere, founder of Design Week Lagos, tells OkayAfrica. “It’s a movement that brings together everyone who makes up the design value chain: the educators, the architects, the developers, the designers, and the makers.”

Ogufere started DWL in 2019 and has since grown it into one of the must-attend programs during Lagos Art Week. This year, Ogufere says her highlight has been seeing the collaborative spirit that has emerged amongst participating artists. In addition to that, there were also more than a hundred events during Design Week Lagos happening this year, including exhibitions, masterclasses, talks, studio visits, and so on. 

One of the biggest highlights has been the Design and Innovation Exhibition, curated by Bibi Seck, who’s worked with brands like Moroso and Herman Miller. He’s showing our young designers how global standards of pricing, production, and collaboration work and how to apply them here at home,” Ogufere says. This year, DWL also introduced the DWL Collectibles, which cross-pollinate other artistic disciplines into design. “It features incredible creatives like T.Y. Bello and Lisa Folawiyo, who are translating their creative languages, photography, and fashion into design objects. Seeing that cross-disciplinary energy come alive has been amazing. It really captures what DWL is about: pushing boundaries and celebrating African design in new forms,” Oguefere explains.

As this year’s sprawling and ambitious event wraps up, OkayAfrica rounds up some of the best designs we saw at Design Week Lagos. 

Ike Stools by Acacia Studios

The shape of an acorn and the skin of a browned kolanut, Ike Stools by Acacia Studios, a Nigerian-based design practice with a modernist take on traditional furniture pieces, founded and led by Tomike Layi-Babtunde, is a brilliantly devised piece of work. “The entire practice is rooted in exploration of culture, local materials, nostalgia, curiosity about the present, what that looks like through the context of Nigerian homeware, and how furniture and design objects are a huge part of expressing that culture,” Layi-Babtunde tells OkayAfrica. The cushions on the stools are wrapped in multicolored textiles, creating a visually balanced accompaniment to the firm wooden base. Most impressively, the Ike Stool allows itself to be playful. Its shape is an immediate conversation starter and a source of curiosity. Two important tenets of brilliant design.

Akuko (story) by Chibuzo Emordi

Chibuzo Emordi’s Akuko is, at first glance, a simple book holder, but a closer inspection will reveal its impressive technicality. Made up of fine wood and hand-knotted ropes, Akuko, which translates to story in the Igbo language, is a visually striking piece of work with a strong personal ethos. As Emrodi explains in her artist statement, Akuko is a repository of memories, as well as a conjuring of the memory spaces found in many Nigerian homes. “In many homes, stacks of newspapers, family photo albums, and letters were quiet markers of time passing - of stories being kept.”

Bantu by Joan Eric Udorie

This year, under the African Diaspora Exhibition, Joan Eric Udorie presents an intricate and technically ambitious piece. Made primarily of wood, Udorie’s Bantu is a marvelous feat of wood layering with a strong cultural motif. It’s at once a side table and an ornamental piece mimicking an eternal flow of energy. According to the artist's statement, Bantu is driven by “The seamless dialogue of the warm ebonized wood creates both tension and harmony, while its hovering, weightless silhouette blurs the line between furniture and art.”

Teriba Chair by Richard Aina

Bare-boned and deconstructed, Richard Aina’s Teriba chair, part of a sprawling collection of artisanal chairs, also featuring skeletal motifs and hard leather, is an intelligently conceived blend of inquisitive design and minimalist sensibilities. Aina rethinks the function and purpose of seating by stripping his furniture to their most primal forms, posing the argument that even without too many adornments, furniture can exist with its own sensibility and perspective. 

Eyo Lamp by Ezekiel Osunala

The Eyo Lamp by Ezekiel Osunala resembles the famous Eyo masquerade, native to Lagos State. Eyo Masquerades are famous for their billowing white garments, covering their faces to their feet, large hats fringed with designs, and a staff. Osunala’s lamp mimics the billowing form of the Eyo garment, while also featuring wave-like incisions that look like an Eyo masquerade in motion. The top of the lamp features a miniature hat with tiny studs dangling from its rim.

Beacon of Thoughts by Abduljaleel Sodangi

Abduljaleel Sodangi positions the table and lamp as facilitators of everyday thinking. Sodangi uses used furniture, which has borne witness to numerous conversations, deliberations, decisions, and thinking as a direct activator. The table is carved with words, and the pyramid-shaped lantern that serves as its focal point glows with the gentle simmer of an idea shaping into form.

Abiola Diana Makinde’s Ijoko Ore is a maze-like, interconnected wooden piece that, according to Makinde, is dedicated to “chosen sisters that embody the sacredness and tenderness of sisterhood.” Physically, there is nothing tender about Ijoko Ore. Ends are jutted and sides are slightly winged, but these elements give the piece a sense of collective coordination. It revels in its sturdy power, firm, abiding, and able to carry the weight of man or object.

Ijoko Ore by Abiola Diana Makinde

Abiola Diana Makinde’s Ijoko Ore is a maze-like, interconnected wooden piece that, according to Makinde, is dedicated to “chosen sisters that embody the sacredness and tenderness of sisterhood.” Physically, there is nothing tender about Ijoko Ore. Ends are jutted and sides are slightly winged, but these elements give the piece a sense of collective coordination. It revels in its sturdy power, firm, abiding, and able to carry the weight of man or object.