The practice / AGBOLÉ OYÈ
A living
design language.
01 / The Studio
Objects in conversation.
AGBOLÉ OYÈ is an independent, research-led design practice creating collectible furniture, lighting, and objects. In conversation with African and diasporic histories, the studio explores how cultural knowledge and inherited forms can inform contemporary design.
02 / Philosophy
The courtyard as a starting point.
The practice takes inspiration from àgbò ilé, the Yoruba family compound, and the courtyard as a space connecting individual and communal life. Within this shared environment, different people, activities, and everyday rituals exist alongside one another.
Rather than reproducing the architecture, AGBOLÉ OYÈ explores how the courtyard’s social principles can find expression through furniture, objects, and the spaces they help shape.
This understanding of shared space informs the studio’s exploration of Fourth Spaces, environments shaped by the experience of living between cultures, where different histories, identities, and ways of life can coexist without becoming the same.
03 / Approach
Past as
possibility.
Grounded in cultural anthropology, with an interest in neuroarchitecture and neurodesign, AGBOLÉ OYÈ considers how material, proportion, and spatial arrangement shape our experience of space and one another.
Influenced by Afro-now-ism ↗, developed by artist Stephanie Dinkins, the studio approaches cultural knowledge as something living, open to reinterpretation and new possibilities. Research moves between historical references, material experimentation, prototyping, and collaboration, with attention to the people, places, and traditions from which these ideas emerge.
04 / Process
From inquiry to form.
An ongoing record of research, material exploration, prototyping, and making.