Àbà began with a simple observation. On the Epe corridor you can still buy a plot deep enough to do something with, sixty metres of land running back from the road, and almost everybody builds the same thing on it: a house pushed to the middle, a slab of interlocking stone all around, and a generator house at the back. The land is spent on nothing.
So we drew the house tight to the front of the plot and gave the remaining forty metres a job. Behind the pool terrace there is a stocked catfish pond, then raised vegetable beds, then a fruit orchard of mango, soursop, plantain and pawpaw, and at the far wall a goat and poultry pen with its own service gate so the smell and the feed deliveries never come near the house. A koi pond and a children's play area sit in the cool shade the orchard throws by mid afternoon.
The house itself is deliberately unremarkable in plan, a rectangle two rooms deep, orientated so the long elevations face north and south. What makes it work is what happens at its edges: a two metre roof overhang on all four sides, timber louvre screens on the west, and a double height stair void at the centre that pulls hot air up and out through high level vents. In testing on comparable builds, this keeps the ground floor five to seven degrees below the outside afternoon temperature with no air conditioning running.
It is not a cheap house. But it is a house where the borehole, the solar array, the pond and the beds are part of the architecture rather than things bolted on afterwards, and where a family's food, water and power bills fall every year they live in it.
Who it's for. A family who wants land that works, and is tired of paying Lagos prices for food they could grow.
