Studio practice · Nairobi, Kenya
I design spaces you move through and objects you keep. Interiors, furniture, exhibition builds and slow material research — made in Nairobi, mostly from what grows or gets dug up within a day's drive.
Eight projects, 2019–2026. Photographs by the studio unless credited.
01
A 1960s stone bungalow stripped back to its shell and rebuilt around one long north-facing opening. We kept the original quarry-tile floor, patched the missing squares with terrazzo poured on site, and let the join show. The client asked for a house that would be cooler in February than the one they left.
02
Commissioned by a restaurant in Westlands that wanted serving ware it could drop. Thrown thick, fired twice, glazed only on the inside lip so the outside keeps the grit of the clay. Two of the fourteen cracked in the second firing and we kept them anyway.
03
An ongoing set of benches and low tables built with a single wedged through-joint that needs no glue and no screws. Mvule is hard, heavy and increasingly hard to buy legally, so every board is documented with its source and mill date. Six pieces so far, all knock-down, all repairable with a mallet.
04
Twelve weeks to turn a 400 m² hall into somewhere people would voluntarily sit down. We built four rooms inside the room, each one a different acoustic condition, and hung nothing on the walls. Visitors averaged 34 minutes inside, against a museum baseline of nine.
05
Four years of running a second-year studio where the only deliverable was a physical model at 1:20, built from greyboard and masking tape. No renders, no drawings until week nine. The point was to make students feel a wall thickness in their hands before they ever drew one.
06
A screen for a shared office in Riverside that needed to divide without darkening. Woven by a cooperative in Machakos over five weeks to a pattern we drew together on the workshop floor. It lets through about 60% of the light and all of the noise.
07
We are trying to make a floor tile that is dug, pressed and fired within 40 km of the city. The current batch shrinks 7% in the kiln and warps at the corners; we are adjusting the sand content. Twelve test panels are laid in the studio corridor and walked on daily.
08
A lending library of 60 chairs, built to one pattern, that residents can borrow for a wedding, a funeral or a shop opening instead of renting plastic. Prototype batch of nine is out now. If the join holds through the long rains we build the rest.
I grew up in Nyeri, in a house my grandfather built out of dressed stone and a great deal of stubbornness. That house is the reason I do this. It was not designed by anyone with a title — it was designed by someone who knew how the rain came and where the afternoon sun landed, and it has outlasted most of the buildings put up around it since.
I trained as an architect at the University of Nairobi and worked for six years in commercial practice before leaving in 2016 to work at a smaller scale, where I could follow a material from the ground to the finished thing. Since then the studio has been two or three people at a time, plus a rotating cast of fundis, weavers, potters and welders whose names belong on the work as much as mine does.
My practice sits in the gap between a space and the objects in it. I do not think a room is finished when the walls are painted; it is finished when someone has a chair they don't want to move, a bowl they reach for first, a corner they sit in without deciding to. Most of what I make is an attempt to get closer to that.
I work from a workshop in Kilimani with a north-facing window, a bandsaw older than I am, and a kiln I share with two ceramicists in Kikuyu. I take on three or four projects a year. I would rather do fewer and stay in the room.
Four things I keep coming back to.
Every project starts with chalk on the workshop floor. A doorway is a width you can walk through before it is a number on a drawing. Most of my best decisions were made standing up, holding a piece of timber.
Where I can, materials come from inside a day's drive — stone from Juja, sisal from Machakos, clay from Kikuyu, timber from a mill in Nyeri I have used for nine years. It costs more in phone calls and less in everything else.
Nothing I build should need me to fix it. Joints come apart with a mallet, finishes can be sanded back and re-oiled, tiles can be lifted and relaid. If a piece cannot be repaired by the person who owns it, I have not finished designing it.
Tool marks, patch lines, the seam where two batches of clay meet. I am not interested in surfaces that pretend nothing happened. The record of how a thing was made is part of what it is.
Commissions, collaborations and studio visits. I reply within a week.