Artist Nike Onile Talks Modern House Design and Keeping it Small

With her growing client list, Onile then launched The APT by 800 SQ FT, Canada’s first shoppable apartment, a small modern home space designed with a specific personality imagined by Onile houses everything from the furniture, the clothes in the closet to the food in the fridge are available for purchase. The seasonal pop-up takes places four times a year and allows shoppers to experience a highly-curated home featuring architectural lighting, aromatic candles and abstract art—like an up-scale IKEA (minus the commercialism and claustrophobia).

“When I finally got my first place of my own, it became my new canvas where I didn’t have to hide,” Onile shares. “A friend of mine, now a mentor, persisted that I share my design work and home space with more people.

I posted on a blog, and it went really well with people even asking me to design their spaces. I ended up making more money doing this side project than my full-time work, so I had to make a decision if I wanted to make that leap.” Onile committed to the arts and has been deemed a disruptor in the design realm due to her sophisticated taste expressed in minimal spaces.

“I am an artist whose canvas happens to be people’s homes and whose medium, at the moment, happens to be furniture, art, paint and fabric,” Onile says. Yet her ever-evolving identity, and abilities, lends itself to so much more. “We (800 SQ FT) are essentially a design company that touches multiple spaces,” she shares. This includes commercial, residential, like small modern home designs, restaurants, and branding as well. “The brand will encompass everything I do, whether that’s designing physical space, like interiors, public space or virtual online space and campaigns.”

Nike Onile

Perusing Onile’s portfolio of work shows an artist that is both cerebral and seeking comfort. Living rooms and dining nooks with mostly neutral colors swept with broad strokes of color, accordion paper dining room tables, feather lamp shades, and bronze and terracotta accents throughout.

When it comes to building a small modern house that feels like home and evokes inspiration, Onile speaks of a concept she calls “returning to ritual.” This idea references the incorporation of one’s personal history and practiced tradition into people’s spaces through thoughtful design.

“The things that I tend to gravitate towards are the pieces that have a sense of movement, history and can tell a story all on their own,” Onile says. Some of her favorite artists across disciplines that she both admires and features in her work, include photographer Bastiaan Woudt, ceramics artist Zhu Ohmu, and performance artist Nana Yaa.

For Onile, projects may range from customizing a sacred home space for some; a place for the inhabitant to drop their stresses and slow their pace, and for others this could mean a dynamic place to entertain or an arena to evoke creativity and commit to their craft. Whoever her client is at the moment, Onile aims to draw out their authentic persona and always finds a way to add “that element of awkward, for the sake of story and intrigue.”

NIKE ONILE: Contemporary seems too straight-edged, I like mid-century modern design because a lot of the objects themselves are sculptural statement pieces, materials like marbles and woods and mixed metals with great lines.

When you think about it, especially in Western society, we have kind of lost the traditions and ritual with our fast-paced lives, swiping left and right in these microwaveable relationships in life. Everything is disposable and we have lost this sense of rooting and where things come from. It affects the way we interact and connect with people. If you can, in your life, in the things that surround you, include more reminders of grounding and tradition to elevate your experience.

Depending on the story that I am trying to tell for the client dictates what pieces, artists and fixtures I introduce to the space. When it comes to being intentional in terms of the items I am choosing, while keeping in mind accessibility and the client’s budget, I always like to introduce an element of history or tradition. Some of these items can be things the client has already had in their home, items that they love, and even if they feel awkward or don’t match, I will stick those in there and make them work—because that awkwardness creates a story with more depth.

My taste has changed and right now I am re-discovering how I can allow myself to be creative with this void that I need to create, but also still have an element of ritual. Asking: What is that middle line? And I am not quite sure if that middle line is something physical, or if that middle line is something rooted in ritual, meaning how I use the space and who I use that space with.

Not even as an artist, but as an individual, I am craving the same grounding elements that I help my clients discover in small modern home design. I found that as I’ve grown, I require now my space to be my studio and my home, valuing the softer elements, and my space now needs to reflect that.

I am being called to change that aspect and introduce things of ritual and things that have true meaning for me, like elements from Nigeria, perhaps framing one of my grandmothers African cloths, elements that speak to who I am rather than just an extension of the way that I create.

I love picking up items when I travel, like when I went to Spain, there is so much texture there, and I like those elements where the piece in themselves is sculptural, made from strange shapes and cut in certain ways that frame your body completely different.

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Nike Onile

ICONIC LIFE: How has travel informed your evolution as an artist, as an individual and as a designer of small modern homes?

NIKE ONILE: I work all year round and then take off about five-to-six weeks and travel to about three or four different countries. Those are my moments of inspiration. When I travel, I don’t go to resorts, I go to be around people, I love to stay amongst people that live in the area; with the locals, to see the culture and architecture of a place. In that I am able to really understand how space dictates the life that people live and vice versa.

For example, when I went to Morocco, I stayed in a riad in Marrakech and when you’re walking through the narrow streets, there are high walls and no windows. Then once you enter into the space, all the rooms have their windows facing inside, over a garden or a pool. You immediately feel the energy change, you leave everything outside because there are physical barriers now. All of your energy is redirected into the family and it becomes this collected beauty.

I am able to take in all of the information while I am traveling and be inspired, so that when I come back here, I am able to change slight things that I do when designing small modern homes within the confines of Western architecture. For example, I have introduced this idea of un-burdening into the entry ways of people’s homes, so that when people step inside, the energy changes.

In Western society, we are taught this idea of possibility, but when speaking to my cousins, that is foreign to them. That is something we take for granted, this idea that we can do anything that we want. I had a security guard full-time, and it felt very restrictive. Everything reminded me that I have privilege, the way that I think is a privilege. What Nigeria did for me was hold up a mirror for me to recognize why I saw myself the way that I did.

The modern design work that I will likely do in Nigeria is about creating a space for people to live in and create incredible lives, while showing them this idea of having a limitless mentality. If I can use design and architecture and the way that I create public space to help that, well, that’s something that has been on my heart for a bit now. I just want to give them the space to create and live the way that they choose to live.