Inigo

Two weeks before Covid turned the world upside down and then locked it inside, in February 2020, Kemide Lawson and her family of four moved house. The timing was down-to-the-wire impeccable. A few days later and they’d have spent lockdown with Kemide’s in-laws, which she says would have worked well. But having a garden, a common, a nature reserve, a country park, and a brand-new home full of histories to explore was so much fun.

When Kemide and her husband bought their mid-18th-century bakery in north London, it was, she says, in good condition, clearly beloved of generations of owners (on the Tithe Map of 1838, its owner is listed as one “Clutterbuck, the brewer”). Instead of the kind of boring but indispensable building work often needed in old buildings, she was able to immediately get stuck into the very best part of doing up a new home – the decoration.

Pointing out that the US has just celebrated its 250th anniversary, she notes that her house is older than America. “It’s all listed. And I loved that, the history of the house. I took it as a leaping-off point, thinking, ‘Let’s add ours as another layer on top’. I had all these dreams and ambitions for the house, and I let myself run with it.”

Kemide wanted a home where everyone, family and friends alike, could relax their shoulders and be at peace. She wanted it to be overall fun and joyful for her two young girls, then seven and nine. She also wanted it to represent her family history and dual Nigerian and Jamaican heritage, and a place where she could display all the objects she’d collected over the years. Mostly, she wanted the fact that a proud Black family lived in it to be tangible. She duly set up an Instagram account, @cottagenoir, to document the process. The extensive community she has since convened points to how resonant these ideas are.

Kemide’s vision is as intimate and privately nurtured as it is expansive. As she highlights in her forthcoming book, House Proud: Black Interiors and Architecture Across Continents and Centuries (out 1st September), it’s all about emphasising lineage and belonging. She likes to joke, she says, that the full compound label for her aesthetic is probably “Afro-aristo-meets- Caribbean-nan-chic”. Growing up, she used to go to stately homes and think, “Oh, these are white stories, or English stories." But then she visited Devon House in Jamaica, built in 1881 by George Stiebel, the country’s first Black millionaire, and thought, “Wow, we have our own stately homes, as well.” Of her daughters, she says, “I just want them to know they have their own stories too. I want that to be very clear when they come home every day.”

Her home is that sentiment writ large in comforting hues (lots of greens, mustard, tie-dyed indigo) and enveloping tactility (hessian wallpaper, patterned cushions and carpets). Family is everywhere.

For the white boarded front door, Kemide ordered a custom coir entrance mat with “Ẹkáàbọ̀” scrawled across it – “Welcome” in Yoruba. She papered the stairwell with Yaël & Valérie's Faces design: medallion portraits, celebrating 500 years of Black womanhood, drawn in sepia on a rich emperor-yellow background. Beneath each powerful figure is written an affirmation in French (the brand is of French-speaking Haitian origin), translating variously as “I nourish", “I protest”, “I resist”, “I commit”. It's a powerful message of resilience, visually underscored by the exposed structural beams of burnished wood, aged timbers that have kept the house upright for nigh on 300 years. The wallpaper is the first thing her daughters see when they open their bedroom doors each morning. She hoped it would spur them on as much as it did her.

For the living room, Kemide opted for leafy colours, to bring the outdoors in, and rhythmic geometric patterning as a backdrop for artworks of all shapes and sizes. She has a lovely collection of paintings. One auction purchase, by a PM Banks of whom she knows nothing further, echoes many of the canvases in the Tate’s recent ‘Nigerian Modernism’ show. For Kemide, going to see that exhibition was, “really like coming home”. Her Nigerian grandfather commissioned pieces by Bruce Onobrakpeya, member of the Zaria Art Society; Ben Enwonwu made a sculpture of her husband’s grandfather, which sits in his grandparents’ home.

Kemide’s bookshelves and mantlepieces also boast a medley of vintage finds, with tiny bronze figurines and handles (a giraffe, a pair of thrones) providing bright, warming accents.

When surveying incredible Black homes from around the world for her book, one of the themes she identified is what she calls an architecture of rhythm: “It comes through in pattern and symbol, the way people are dancing in the front room …” While what she has written is ostensibly about interiors, it isn’t about decorating tips. Instead, it homes in on a kind of music – “the music of people's voices, of a ritual, a spiritual chant or a hymn, the music of family around a kitchen table together. That’s what really means home to me.”

Upstairs, in the main bedroom, Kemide has hung a textile piece of handwoven silk on the wall. It was presented by her husband’s family to her own, as a written marriage proposal asking her to join them. Elsewhere she has photographs of modernist oil portraits of her husband’s grandparents, by a Brazilian artist. The originals, of course, are in Nigeria, but taking pictures of them was a way to bring that energy into her London home.

For Kemide, the most special object in the house is a photograph of her as a little girl with her great-grandmother, whom she met only once, in Jamaica. Her grandmother, Enid Thompson, moved from the Caribbean to Bristol in the 1950s. What Kemide gleaned from that home, where she would spend weekends while at boarding school, was “the permission to be maximalist, to proudly display the things that are important to me,” she says. “It was the classic West Indian thing. I was never allowed in the front room, which was multicoloured, with floral wallpaper, a floral carpet, lots of lace, lots of graduation photographs, some religious artefacts, lots of pride.”

Kemide is now honouring and crucially evolving that tradition. She wants things out of protective casings and within reach: things you can touch, know, love and feel. Things that tell you, you are home.

On the wall above Kemide’s sofa is a magnificent Ghanaian Asafo flag in red. It depicts a tree full of fruit, with animals all around. It’s called The Welcoming Tree. She thinks of it as a metaphor for what she has created here. To her mind, a home can be a child’s first museum. Making associations between their history and feeling happy at home embeds knowledge in a way no lesson ever can.

A Polite Request

A Polite Request

Further Reading

Agency

Agency

Further Reading