Kemida Lawson Explores the Beauty of Cultivating Culture at Home
For Kemide Lawson, home was never just a place to put beautiful things.
Drawing on her dual Nigerian and Jamaican heritage, the founder of The Cornrow and the voice behind Cottage Noir has spent years turning her own home into a living study of what it means for Black people to décor with intention, and turning that study into a body of work - from museum installations to a forthcoming book on Black interiors - that's reshaping how the design world talks about home altogether.
In this conversation, Kemide opens her door to talk about the objects that hold her family's story, the feelings she wants her space to carry, and what it looks like to build a home that's unmistakably, unapologetically you.
Photography | Anna Stathaki
What does the Rhythm of Home mean to you, and how does it show up in your space?
There is a fireplace in my living room that I have decorated with black-and-white
geometric tiles, an array of triangles that echoes the painted Kassena homes of
Burkina Faso. Those repeating symbols, in the hearth of the home, give the room a
beat, an unmistakable sense of rhythm. I learned to understand the rhythm of home while writing House Proud.
Researching Black homes across continents and centuries, I kept noticing the same
handful of ideas kept re-surfacing, and I came to think of them as AI - Ancestral
Intelligence. Rhythm is one of them.
Léopold Sédar Senghor, the Senegalese poet-president whose own home appears
in the book, understood rhythm as something fundamental to African aesthetics, felt
through line, surface, colour and volume.
For me, the rhythm of home is both tangible and intangible. Tangibly, it is the design
language: the repeating pattern of a textile, painted geometry across a surface, the
carving on a piece of cabinetry. And rhythm can be present whether a home is
minimalist or adorned, colourful or monochrome.
Intangibly, it is the rhythm of the life lived within the home: from the ancient ancestral
ceremonies in traditional African homes to the self-care rituals of modern day life. It
is in the music we play, the way we gather, and the dance parties in the kitchen. A
home has its own tempo.
Tell us about a piece of art, object, or heirloom in your home that carries a story. Why does it matter to you?
The object I would save first is a piece of paper.
It is a framed 1825 “Return of Slaves” record listing my six-times great-grandmother,
Minerva, and her daughter Bess. The record notes that Bess ran away from the
plantation in St James, Jamaica, where she had been enslaved, leaving behind her
mother and her own two daughters. It is bittersweet proof of two lives, recorded in
the handwriting of the people who claimed to own them.
It hangs on my Ancestor Wall alongside photographs, paintings and mementoes of
our family going back several generations. Assembling that wall was an emotional
experience because, for the first time, I had deliberately created a space to centre
the people who laid the path my husband and I now walk.
Each photograph tells a story. Together they tell the large stories of enslavement,
migration and social progress. Individually, they tell the intimate ones: births,
marriages, graduations, celebrations. I am so proud of everyone on that wall.
Having an Ancestor Wall feels like a contemporary expression of the veneration of
ancestors that sits at the heart of many traditional African spiritual practices. And I believe that a tangible sense of ancestral connection and guidance is there for
anyone who chooses to be open to it.
I have dedicated House Proud to Bess and her unfathomable courage. I still do not
know what became of her.
How has your cultural background, community, or lived experience shaped
your sense of home?
The entry mat at my front door says “Ekaabo,” which is Yorùbá for “welcome.” Inside
the living room hangs an Asafo flag from coastal Ghana, made by Baba Issaka, who
began his apprenticeship at the age of ten. It is called ‘The Welcoming Tree as
beneath its branches every animal is welcome.
It is really clear that my cultural background is the central underpinning to my sense
of home, both in terms of the aesthetics and in terms of how I want it to feel, as a
warm and welcoming place for my chosen community.
My mother is of Jamaican heritage and my father is Nigerian, Yorùbá, specifically,
and I grew up between Lagos and London. That has given me the privilege of
witnessing the Black experience from two perspectives, African and diasporic, and
both are reflected in my home.
There is Yorùbá modernist art and African textiles on the walls, but there is also the
influence of the “front rooms” of the Windrush generation, the Caribbean families
who settled in Britain in large numbers from the late 1940s onwards. The front room
was the best room in the house: polished, immaculate, crowded with treasures and
often reserved for visitors and Sunday best. I share and celebrate the aesthetic in
House Proud.
What that aesthetic handed down to me was permission: permission to display my
treasures rather than store them away, and to enjoy colour, ornament and pattern
without restraint.
I call the interior aesthetic of my home “Afro Aristo meets Caribbean Nan chic,”
inspired by my Nigerian and Jamaican t grandmothers and their very different,
equally brilliant ways of making home.
When you think about the space you are creating, what feelings or energy do
you want it to hold?
Upstairs, on the landing outside my daughters’ bedrooms, there is a bright yellow
wallpaper by the Haitian brand Yaël et Valérie featuring six historic women. They
include Idia, a queen of ancient Benin; Sanité Bélair, the Haitian revolutionary; and
Kathleen Cleaver of the Black Panther Party.
My girls walk past these women every single morning before they walk past almost
anything else.
That is the energy I want the house to hold: happiness, joy, cultural pride. I designed
for those feelings deliberately because I knew this was the space two little Black girls
would grow up in, and I knew the outside world would not always be as generous to
them as these walls are.
The deeper I went into the history of Black homes while writing House Proud, the
more I understood just how much a house can carry. As my home evolves I find
myself leaning into two aspects of Ancestal Intelligence that I feel I can explore
more.
The first is the home as a place for extended family and community: somewhere we
gather, support one another, exchange ideas and sometimes brew radical ones. My
inspiration are the compound houses of West Africa, spaces where family meant
upwards of twenty members of a close knit clan.
The second is the home as a spiritual space. Across many of the ancestral homes I
researched, altars and thresholds were home spaces made sacred. Space was held
for the living and the dead together. I find myself thinking a great deal about how we
continue that tradition within modern life.
My Ancestor Wall is the start.
I want my daughters to feel watched over, not only by me, but by their community
and by the ancestors who came before them. The fact that I worry if that sounds
spooky to my readers shows me how far we have gone from our traditional African
belief systems as there is nothings spooky about family!
What advice would you give to someone building a home that reflects who
they are?
[If you are able] Start by calling your grandmother.
Ask her what her childhood home looked like. What was on the walls? Which room
was nobody allowed into, and why? What objects did everyone treasure?
Then find something your family already owns, however dated, unfashionable or
kitsch it might look to you now, and put it somewhere you will see it every day, and
somewhere that shows it is valued.
That is almost the whole method: treasure the family heirlooms we have and actively
create new ones. For many Black diasporic families, the very possibility of objects
surviving intact across several generations is a privilege our histories did not always
allow us, hence I spend a lot of time creating, and collecting new heirlooms.
The central invitation of House Proud is to build a home that reflects who you are.
That is almost the opposite of the five-star-hotel aesthetic so many contemporary
homes are encouraged to emulate. Instead, I am interested in homes so specific to a family’s lived experience, personal tastes and memories that they could not possibly
belong to anyone else.
To do this you have to be bold. Let go of some of those loaded ideas about what constitutes “good taste” and “bad taste,” what is kitsch and what is heritage, and,
above all, try not to worry about what your choices might do to the resale value.
Decorate for yourself now, not for a hypothetical future buyer and not for a
tastemaker who will have moved on by next season.
About Kemida
Kemide is a writer and cultural thinker of Nigerian and Jamaican heritage. She is the founder of Cottage Noir, a visual platform dedicated to Black homes of the past and present. She is also the creator of Afri-tectural Digest, her Substack publication exploring Black history and culture through the lens of the home. Kemide curated an installation for the Museum of the Home in 2022 and has consulted for agencies such as Stylus and Selfgood on future trends and cultural identity. She has been featured in several papers and magazines including the Guardian, the Sunday Times, Harper’s Bazaar, Livingetc and Elle Decoration. Her first book House Proud: Black Interiors and Architecture Across Continents and Centuries will be published by RIBA in 2026. Kemide lives in an 18th century cottage in north London with her family.
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