It was mixed fortune for the Interior Designers Association of Nigeria (IDAN) last week, as the yearly exhibition was held with 60 exhibitors as against 90 that participated last year.
Notwithstanding, the exhibition had an impressive turnout of visitors.
The expo focused on the theme of home grown, home inspired products and their designers to encourage up and coming talents in the industry as well as engender growth.
Speaking at the event, IDAN’s Secretary General and founder, Titi Ogufere, said: “We expected more exhibitors; the one we did last year had 90 exhibitors.
But this year, a lot of people complained of money and all that and we didn’t have as many exhibitors as last year.
“We had a lot of people come in. In fact we actually had to shut down this evening so people can go home for us to have this special VIP event”, she added.
She further disclosed that the association has perfected plans towards partnering with the University of Lagos to begin a degree programme in the Department of Architecture next year.
“At this stage, we have no schools for interior design in the whole of Nigeria, we have just gone into partnership with the University of Lagos. The Department of Architecture is facilitating this for degree programmes starting from next year to train designers. Because we have that major challenge with education, most people that went to school to train in interior design had to go abroad. We do not have a lot of interior designers; in fact we have about 10 per cent interior designers and 90 per cent suppliers,” she stated.
She said: “We decided to focus on homegrown, home inspired companies and products. We want to try and promote more things that we have locally. If you go through the boots, you will see a lot of people coming up with little crafts and things. At the back there you will see a lot of young talents. We have people from Ilasa Market in Lekki. These are really good designers that are not known and we are trying to give them an opportunity, a platform to showcase their work with more established companies.”
Ogufere is hopeful of an international exchange via trade missions that will see some of the raw Nigerian talents in the field going to Italy come next year.
Her words: “We are working on a lot of things to try and promote that because we have the established companies that some of them have partnered with Italian companies and so forth. So what we want to do is some kind of collaboration so that we can actually train some of these designers. This is because what some of them actually need is a lot of exposure. We want to also work on taking them on different trade missions; we want to take them to Italy just to refine what they are doing.”
She continued: “We have been in partnership with the organizers of Salone d mobile, FREDILANO (Association of Furniture Manufacturers of Italy). We have been in collaboration with them for about two years now. They invite us every year for the Salone del mobile. And when we go there we try to do like an exchange. We are doing the first one next year in April where we are actually taking a few of our talents to learn some of these things and vice versa.
On finance, she said, such issues will always be there and that interior design is a necessity.
“We will always have those issues. But we do not depend on government. There are things that are necessities – food is a necessity, shelter is a necessity. So, interior design industry is a necessity. It is not like art and others that you can say are luxuries. People need to sit on chairs, they need beds and they need those basic things. So, it is just for us to say, ‘Okay, these things are needed’. Whether they do it on a high scale or a low scale, we need to provide a platform for people, she added.
This year’s exhibition was the fourth in the series and held at the Landmark Event Centre, Lekki
