5 unsung ways Black interior design has influenced your home decor

Kemi Lawson spent the first part of her career working in the City, before she decided to shift lanes. She recently launched The Cornrow, an online homeware and lifestyle store tailored to a modern Black aesthetic. Through her Instagram channel, she is also focused on educating her followers on the widely overlooked history of Black interior design.

Moving house with a husband and two young daughters inspired a quandary familiar to many – how to transform a property into a loving family home that reflects who we are. Our new abode in North West London was a 250-year-old listed cottage, so we decided to use the interiors to celebrate our history and heritage as a Black British family of both Nigerian and Jamaican descent.

I started researching interior design with a focus on what I loosely termed the modern Black aesthetic. I began with interior design magazines, especially those tailored to period homes and country cottages, and supplemented them with coffee table books, Pinterest and Instagram. Simply put, I have never felt more unseen as a Black British women than in the pages of interior magazines. Did Black people not buy homes? Did we not design interior products? Were there no interior styles or trends that could be attributed to Black culture? Evidently not, according to the piles of interior titles which now filled my home. The coffee table books were not much better; a huge tome called A History of Interior Design, purporting to tell the story of 6,000 years of global interiors, devoted a laughable two pages to the Black experience, and these both on Ancient Egypt. Others I found on Black interiors were often out of print and out of date.

Kemi Lawson in her home office

Courtesy

Undeterred, I turned to social media. I set up an Instagram account, @cottagenoir, and dived in to share my stories and to learn from others. But here dominant voices belonged to white middle class women, and the dominant aesthetics, scandi, hygge, boho, cottagecore, simply were not the stories I wanted to tell. I felt increasingly frustrated, upset and lonely.

And then on 25 May, George Floyd was murdered, and everything changed.

Amid the global outcry, there was a sudden realisation of all the different facets of life where Black voices have been stifled, including the interiors world. The industry realised that Black homes matter. In fact, I believe Black homes really matter; they are an expression of Black joy and the Black everyday experience – an important counterpoint to the pervasive imagery and discussion of Black trauma. The interiors pages started to proactively look for Black content, and even I found myself on the pages of a few magazines. I started curating the missing stories on the history of Black interior design through my Instagram account. I worried that without understanding the history, Black design would continue to languish in the clichéd realms of animal print, safari chic and brash wax prints from Holland (more of the latter later). It would continue to be categorised as ‘tribal’ or ‘ethnic’. I love elements of all of these styles, but I knew, as author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie warned, of the danger of a single story. We were and are so much more than this.

Black homes really matter; they are an expression of Black joy and the everyday Black experience

As my research intensified and I unearthed more on the history of Black interior design, I started sharing these stories via Instagram. The response was overwhelming. I discovered the breadth of Black interior design and the extent to which Black culture has contributed to the industry, and the way we decorate our homes. Below are just five hallmarks of Black interior design that have influenced how we live today.

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