Abuja is not a tropical climate in the way Lagos is, and pretending otherwise is why so many houses there are unbearable. The coast is humid and thermally flat, 26 degrees at night, 32 by day, all year. Abuja swings. In February it can be 41 degrees at three in the afternoon and nineteen before dawn. Humidity drops into the teens. Harmattan dust gets into everything.
A swing that large is not a problem, it is a resource, and the way you exploit it is mass. Ìmọ̀lẹ̀'s external walls are 300mm compressed laterite block, the red earth is on site and it is nearly free, rendered outside and left exposed in places inside. Those walls take eight to ten hours to conduct heat through them. The afternoon's heat arrives in the rooms around eleven at night, by which time the outside air has dropped twenty degrees and you flush it straight back out through high level openings. The house is coolest when you need it and warmest at dawn when you don't mind.
At the centre is a shaded courtyard with a shallow water channel running its length. In a dry season climate, evaporation does real work, twenty square metres of moving water measurably drops the temperature and lifts the humidity of the air crossing it before that air enters the house. Every principal room opens onto this courtyard rather than onto the outside.
Harmattan drove the rest of the detailing. Openings are smaller and higher than a Lagos house would want, glazing is deeply recessed behind concrete reveals, and the courtyard's planting is chosen for dust tolerance and for the dry months, bougainvillea, frangipani, desert rose, agave, rather than the moisture hungry palms that struggle north of the coast.
Who it's for. Abuja professionals and returnees who have seen what 40 degree February afternoons do to a house designed for the coast.
