South African textile brand Skinny laMinx turns up the heat with their latest collection. The SunnySide is a feelgood collection that encourages us to bring a little sunshine and positive energy into our everyday lives. The collection of dining and kitchen textiles features bold patterns and colour prints in the Skinny laMinx signature style, which blends midcentury style, pattern and colour, with African chic.
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Rose & Fitzgerald is a Ugandan design and craft studio that was born from of an American couple’s move to Kampala and their desire to share the craft and creativity of their adopted home with design lovers around the world, shining a spotlight on the skills and talent that is often over-looked in the global design industry.
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Studio Badge in Ghana creates chic lifestyle accessories for the modern home. Bearing a minimalist aesthetic underpinned by the founder’s architectural background, each product is handcrafted in limited edition quantities meaning a unique product.
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Bold graphic black and white prints with a distinctive Afro-Scandi aesthetic characterise the designs of Pino Nord, a design lifestyle company based in Nairobi, Kenya. Pino Nord draws on the minimalism of Scandinavian design, and fuses this with the vibrancy, boldness and artistic expression of daily life in Nairobi, and from this fusion comes a style that Pino Nord calls Tropical Minimalism.
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Bolgatanga in Ghana’s Upper East Region is synonymous with basket weaving, and the distinctive round-bellied Bolga Market basket with its sturdy handles. Building on the region’s basket weaving heritage local business The Baba Tree Basket Company is producing some stunning gravity-defying basket designs, woven from locally sourced natural materials and dyed in vibrant colours.
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Water Hyacinth is a plant that takes root in waterways the world over, causing destruction to aquatic and plant eco-systems. For communities that rely on their waterways for food, livelihoods, and transportation water hyacinth blocks access to the water essential to their survival. In Nigeria, a local social enterprise, MitiMeth, is harvesting water hyacinth and turning it into functional handcrafted products, and empowering members of the local community.
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You can never have too many wooden spoons. In all shapes, sizes and natural tones, a collection by British textile designer Kirsten Hecktermann leaves you spoilt for choice.
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Luxury artisanal accessory brand AAKS has launched a stunning home decor collection inspired by the theme Weaving for Change. The collection comprises five distinctive handcrafted lamps and light pendants, each created in partnership with women artisans from the Tuareg community in Northern Mali who are living as refugees in Burkina Faso. In working with this Tuareg community AAKS are helping to celebrate and preserve the community’s cultural identity and their time-honoured basket weaving traditions, a philosophy that has defined AAKS’s work with local communities in Ghana.
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Our choice of art says a lot about who we are, reflecting our tastes and experiences amongst other indicators. And despite digital platforms enabling us to discover original talent the sheer amount of information being put out can sometimes have the opposite effect of making it difficult to find, purchase or remember where we saw artwork that represents who we are in one place. Enter Ayok’a, a curated platform that brings together the work of talented black artists making it easy for you to find stylish, original and representative artwork to adorn your walls or carry about your person in the form […]
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The launch of luxury tea brand YSWARA’s Johannesburg tearoom has been joined by the opening of one in Accra, Ghana. The YSWARA tearoom and boutique is part of a collaborative space shared with local retailer Luxury Living and Akrafo, YSWARA’S sister brand of gourmet condiment’s, bringing gourmet and interior decor experience to the city’s stylish residents.
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Olivia Knox is an interior accessories company born out of seeing the beauty in Ankole horn, which has a distinctive light ivory colour. The company was founded by Olivia Byanyima who hails from Uganda and lives in New York, and Shanley Knox from California, and is driven by the story of Olivia’s childhood in Uganda, where she spent a lot of time on her father’s ranch watching his herd of Ankole cattle roam the surrounding plains alongside buffalo, zebra, leopard, and lion.
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Ancient Adinkra symbols and the wisdom of Ghanaian proverbs serve as the decorative backdrop to a collection of handmade and handprinted interior textiles and decor accessories by AMWA Designs, a UK-based studio that was founded in 2014 by textile designer Chrissa Amuah, a graduate of Chelsea College of Art & Design, University of the Arts London.
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The ancient art Of Egyptian appliqué has inspired a textile project called Kheyameya. Kheyameya refers to the intricately stitched textiles made by the legendary Tentmakers of Cairo, highly skilled artists who for centuries have created appliqué textiles that were traditionally used to line the interior of tents. As time has passed the number of artists has dwindled and the Khayameya produced today are mainly for home furnishings or wall hangings for the tourist market.
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Just in time for the Christmas season of giving Aduna Baobab has released a collection of gift tins each covered in one of the brand’s signature African print textile inspired patterns, accentuated with a pop art twist. The tins are designed to store favourite foods and snacks or to give as gifts.
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Mhondoro Game Lodge in Welgevonden Reserve, South Africa opened in early 2016 and seeks to move beyond being just another luxury Africa travel bush destination. Designed to give guests a seamless experience of luxury interiors and bushveld landscape Mhondoro Game Lodge combines cutting-edge architecture with some of the best in African design interior inspiration. The Mhondoro Game Lodge was created by interior designer Myriam Vogel who co-owns the lodge with her husband Frank.
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There is nothing I love more than a good cup of tea, the stronger the better. Anytime is teatime as far as I am concerned, so you can only imagine what I think about those who take their tea as seriously as I do. Like YSWARA for instance, the luxury tea brand championing made in Africa, who are reviving the ceremony of ancient African tea drinking rituals with its offering of specially blended teas and accompanying accessories. And now you can immerse yourself fully in the YSWARA brand experience with the launch of their flagship tearoom and store in […]
Read MoreBelgian interior fragrance brand, Boabab Collection recently launched a new range of scented candles that celebrate exquisite African craftsmanship, natural materials, and invigorating scents. [Main image credit: Mena Max 24 Candle –M project by Baobab Collection – Delyss]
Read MoreAugust heralds the start of the global design exhibition season, which runs for several months. In Johannesburg, 100% Design South Africa, billed as the go-to interior design show for all things African design will run from the 5th-9th August. Now in its third year 100% Design South Africa will channel continental African cool with its abundance of contemporary ‘Chic Afrique’ – African interior design inspiration content.
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The newsletter of textile designer Eva Sonaike introduced me to a stylish range of African inspired cooking utensils by The Aga Concept, a design and lifestyle brand that is inspired by culture and everyday living in Africa. For a lot of Zimbabweans living abroad, and most likely for a lot of Africans in general, cooking traditional food is simply not the authentic experience we crave without the traditional utensils from home, usually brought back on every trip, because buying and using that wooden spoon or pestle and mortar from your local store is somehow just not the same. Our traditional […]
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ShweShwe is an awarding winning wallpaper designed by interior designer Ghislaine Viñas for Flavor Paper. Born in the Netherlands, raised in South Africa and now living in New York Ghislaine turned the popular African print textile from her childhood into a stylish interior accessory by translating the distinctive intricate often dotted geometric patterns that characterise ShweShwe into a bold exaggerated print wallpaper collection. ShweShwe is available in four colourways, each named after South African wildlife. ShweShwe wallpaper is digitally printed and available on a number of materials for residential and commercial use that range from eco-friendly to vinyl.
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