Most three bedroom bungalows on a Lagos estate plot are a solid brick of rooms with a corridor down the middle. The middle rooms get one window, no through draught, and an air conditioner running eleven hours a day. Ìtùra is the same brief and the same footprint, folded into an L around an open courtyard instead.
The consequence is simple and it is the whole point: every habitable room now has windows on two sides. Air comes in from the shaded courtyard and leaves through the outer wall. On a still day the courtyard's own temperature difference drives the draught. Three ceiling fans replace three split units, and the house's running cost drops by more than the courtyard cost to build.
It is a modest house and we have not dressed it up. Rendered blockwork painted bone white, a single floating flat roof plane in charcoal standing seam with a solar array set flush into it, slim matte black window frames, and a covered veranda along the courtyard edge on slim steel posts with a timber batten soffit. The money that would have gone into a portico and a marble entrance went into the cantilever, the glazing and the courtyard planting.
Ìtùra is drawn for a 20 by 30 metre estate plot, which is the plot most people actually own. It can be built while you live elsewhere, and it can take a second storey later, the foundations and the stair position are already sized for it.
Who it's for. A first time builder on a standard 600sqm plot who wants something better than the developer bungalow next door, for roughly the same money.
