In a bedroom in Lekki, Lagos, interior designer Anita Precious chose a red bed, a deep orange-brown wall and a mural by an artist on her team at Noani Design. She still remembers her pleasure at seeing the colours together. The client loved the room, too. Earlier in her career, Anita says, she might have hesitated to show anyone the idea.
For a long time, she assumed most clients wanted to play it safe. It was an assumption with consequences: if she kept her more adventurous ideas to herself, prospective clients had little way of knowing that she had those rooms in her. As she began sharing more colourful work, she noticed people coming to her precisely because they wanted to see where her imagination would take them.
“They expect my eccentric mind,” she says.
Anita is the founder and creative director of Noani Design, a Lagos interior design studio. She has a fondness for warm neutrals, rich textures and beautifully finished furniture. Lately, colour has been claiming more of her attention. The Lekki bedroom offers a clue to what she finds compelling about it. A red bed is a bold choice on its own. Putting it against deep orange-brown gives the two colours a relationship; the warmth of one carries into the other. The mural brings the work of another creative hand into the room. Each decision makes more sense in the company of the others.
Ask Anita how she responds when a client requests a luxurious home and she gently corrects the premise. Her clients rarely put it that way. In her experience, the quality is already expected. What she listens for is more revealing: which pieces a client is willing to invest in, how particular they are about the finish, where they welcome an unexpected idea and which personal habits they want the design to accommodate.
Sometimes the request is as ordinary as extra storage beneath a bed. Anita finds nothing unusual about that. The client needs more room for their belongings; a bed with pull-out storage makes sense. She has heard enough variations on how people want to live to take such requests in stride. That ease is part of her approach. A client should be able to mention what would make life easier and trust the designer to take it seriously.
“Tailoring a home is the ultimate luxury for me,” she says.
Her interest in buildings dates to the afternoons her father collected her from school and took her to the site of their family home. She was seven and liked to walk the foundations with him whenever she could. A degree in international relations followed, along with the possibility of a career in politics. She eventually returned to buildings, worked with a family friend and took on freelance design work. At 22, a conversation at a work party led to a commission to design a residence on Banana Island. She formally registered her business in 2017.
Years of practice have given her confidence in two kinds of judgement. One is knowing when to show a client the red bed. The other is knowing what still needs her attention when the furniture is in place and the project appears finished.
Before handing over a home, Anita asks her team to switch things on. The televisions, the air conditioning units, the water heater, the LEDs and every spotlight: she wants to see them running together. She pays attention to how the house functions with all of that equipment in use, and she wants to see for herself that each fitting works. A single dark spotlight is exactly the sort of detail she would rather catch while her team is there. What she wants the client to inherit from that final walkthrough is peace of mind.
That concern for the experience of a finished room extends to Noani Home, her home products business. Its bedding collection began with something she had wanted for her own bedroom: the feel of a five-star hotel bed, with sheets that left room for playfulness. She chose cotton sateen and embroidery in blues, browns and light grey. Even on a white bed, she felt, a small area of intricate colour could give the setting a character of its own.
For someone encountering Anita’s work for the first time, the Lekki bedroom and the handover ritual offer two particularly telling introductions. In one, she trusts her eye enough to put forward a colour combination that excites her. In the other, she stays long enough to see every spotlight come on. Both decisions belong to the same designer, and both matter to the person who will live there. The red bed is the detail a client might fall in love with. The working light is one they should never have to call her about.
