Yinka Ilori
Designers & Makers · UK“British-Nigerian and working across furniture, installation and architecture since founding his studio in 2017, Yinka Ilori has made colour itself into a signature — impossible to mistake for anyone else's work.”
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.
His latest project takes that story back to where it began. Chairman, his debut monograph, is the first in-depth look at more than a decade of his chair works, tracing how discarded furniture becomes a vehicle for memory, identity and community, rooted in Nigerian storytelling and shaped by contemporary London. It launches alongside his first-ever chair exhibition, staged during Frieze London from 14 to 16 October 2026 at the Walter Sickert Community Centre in Islington, the same neighbourhood as the estate where he grew up.