Who: Ngozi Eze · Does: Textile designer, founder of Indigo Room · City: Lagos · Home: 1970s bungalow, rebuilt 2024 · Designed by: Tunde Bakare, with Ngozi
Twelve years ago Ngozi Eze sold her first indigo scarves from a folding table at a Lekki craft market. Today her studio employs forty dyers and weavers, and her cloth hangs in hotels from Accra to Lisbon. The house she bought with the business’s first real profits is a low 1970s bungalow she spent three years putting back together.
“I wanted a house that felt like the studio,” she says. “Everything handmade, nothing precious, everything used.” The original walls stayed; the roof, the floors and almost everything inside them did not.
The living room
The main room is where the business started again after the pandemic: samples pinned to the walls, a long table for cutting, and a sofa nobody is allowed to put cloth on.
The colours come from the studio. Every wall is a shade the dyers mixed first on cotton, then on plaster, until it held.
The kitchen
The kitchen is the one room she let someone else design. “I cook for twenty on Sundays. It had to work before it looked good.”
Their things
- The first loom — bought second-hand in Iseyin for the price of a phone, still in use.
- A painting by a student she met at Art X Lagos — the first artwork she ever paid for, in three instalments.
- Her father’s record player — highlife on Sundays, nothing else.
- The car — a 2009 Toyota she refuses to replace. “It got me to every client meeting for six years.”
She is careful about what the house says. “People see the house and think it happened overnight. It took twelve years, two failed shops and a lot of borrowed money.”
Advice: Start smaller than you think, and keep going longer than anyone expects.
This is a demo story for the At Home format. Ngozi Eze, Indigo Room and this home are invented, and the photos are sample images.
