Why Yinka Ilori is in the Design 100

Ilori’s breakthrough came with Happy Street, his redesign of a once-grim railway underpass on Thessaly Road in Nine Elms, unveiled for the London Festival of Architecture in 2019. Working with Wandsworth Council and the local community, he replaced a stretch people avoided after dark with rainbow-striped soffits and dozens of patterned enamel panels — his first public commission, and the project that carried his name well beyond the design press.

That instinct for colour and narrative has run through everything since, from furniture and homeware to murals, installations and architectural collaborations. Ilori draws directly on the patterns of West African textiles and the estates he grew up on, folding his British-Nigerian background into the work rather than treating it as backstory — a through-line that makes a bench, a bridge or a building unmistakably his.