‘Architecture and design should be for everyone’: Yinka Ilori’s colourful world |

Walking into Yinka Ilori’s west London studio from the drab suburban business park outside is to enter an oasis. Floor-to-ceiling shelving is lined with the brightly coloured, upcycled chairs, painted or upholstered in West African fabrics, that made Ilori’s name when he first left college. Lush houseplants are dotted around and a portrait of his smiling grandmother sits behind his desk, resplendent in a gele, a traditional head tie. He refers to the picture as we talk about his family’s influence on his work.

“My work is very much about inclusivity and how people enjoy design,” says the 33-year-old. There is also a sense of story, of people communicating, something that started at London Metropolitan University when he was in his second year studying product and furniture design. He was set a project called Our Chair, which referenced Italian designer Martino Gamper’s 100 Chairs in 100 Days (Gamper transformed 100 discarded chairs into entirely new, brilliantly sculptural pieces).

“That was my introduction to Gamper in 2008,” says Ilori. “I thought it was incredible: old objects, new stories, new functions. Simple, but so powerful. That’s what I love – storytelling and exploring memories through design.”

Ilori ran with the idea. He scavenged chairs from skips and picked up those dumped on the street. He also incorporated his own history into his designs. Ilori is British with Nigerian parents: his father, a manager for B&Q, and his mother, who first ran a corner shop – “I was very popular with my friends as we’d get our sweets after school” – and now cooks professionally for large events, raised Ilori and his two brothers and sister on an estate in north London.

“You’re told you are Nigerian at home, but then you go to school and you’re British,” he says. “I lived in Essex Road in Islington, which is a really multicultural neighbourhood and that was nice, so I had the best of both worlds. But it was only when I visited Nigeria that I really got it. I got it that respect is hugely important for my parents: the culture, the language. I get why my parents wear a lot of colour. I understand their journey, their graft. I tried to complain less and respect the fact that they could leave Nigeria and start afresh. And so surely I can make something of myself here? That’s what I try to do.”

His Nigerian heritage also appears in his designs. The parables that his parents told him as a child became an inspiration, the morality tales taking on new meaning now he was working to make a career for himself. Some chairs referred to the…