We don't just build walls.
We build you an actual home.
TropicaLuxe by Akintano is an architecture and build studio working across southern Nigeria and the FCT. We design climate responsive tropical houses, and we build them.
The house is fighting the climate.
Drive through any new estate in Lekki or Lokogoma and you will see the same house repeated: a deep block of rooms with a corridor down the middle, small windows on one side only, a shallow roof with no overhang worth the name, and a portico borrowed from somewhere considerably colder. It is a house designed as though the climate outside were an inconvenience to be sealed out and refrigerated.
The bill for that decision arrives every month. Three or four split units running most of the day. A generator to cover the twelve hours they cannot. Diesel at whatever diesel costs this quarter. Over a twenty year life, the running cost of a badly oriented Nigerian house comfortably exceeds what it cost to build.
None of this is difficult to avoid. Turn the plan so the long walls face north and south. Put an overhang deep enough to keep the sun off the wall and the rain out of an open window. Give every room a second opening so air has a route through. Use mass where the temperature swings and lightweight construction where it doesn't. Plant the trees on the side the afternoon sun comes from.
These are not luxuries and they are not new. They are what tropical architecture in Bali, Kerala, Sri Lanka and coastal Brazil has done for decades. Nigeria has better material to do it with than most, and almost nobody doing it.
We draw it and we build it.
- 01
One party, drawing to handover
The gap between an architect's drawing and what a Nigerian contractor actually builds is where most projects are lost. We hold both ends, so there is nobody to blame and nobody to chase.
- 02
Costed in naira, against your alternative
Every design carries a build band benchmarked against the conventional house on the same plot. We would rather lose the job at the quote than at month fourteen.
- 03
Designed for the diaspora to verify
Fixed camera positions, staged bills of quantities and monthly reporting. If you are building from London or Houston, you can see what changed.
- 04
The garden is on the drawings
Planting, shade, water and, on some plots, food production are set out at design stage by people who know what grows here, not added at the end by a landscaper.
The conditions for this are unusually good.
The climate does the work
Year round warmth and a long wet season support planting that would need heating and irrigation almost anywhere else. Gardens establish here in two years, not ten.
The materials are underfoot
Laterite for compressed earth block, hardwood from the south, sand and aggregate everywhere. The most climate appropriate materials are also the cheapest ones locally.
Solar finally pencils out
Panel and lithium prices have fallen far enough that a properly sized array beats a generator on total cost within four to six years, and it is silent.
The diaspora is building
Millions of Nigerians abroad intend to build at home. Most are badly served, and almost none are offered a design that suits the climate they're building into.
Nobody owns this niche
There is no Nigerian equivalent of the studios doing this in Bali or Kerala. The market is wide open and the buyers already know what they want, they've seen it on Instagram.
Land still allows it
Outside the prime islands you can still buy a plot deep enough to orient a building properly and plant it. That window is closing, but it is open now.
See the six.
Every design, with its plan logic, materials, climate strategy and budget band, and a full set of views.