Indigenous Interior Design Practices and Dialectics

A school of thought from local custodians of culture asserts that arranging the codes, symbols, forms, and materiality in interior environments serves as a medium to showcase people&s;s beliefs, way of life, work, and recreation in time and space. In ancient times, indigenous people lived, shaped, decorated, and modulated interior spaces according to cultural tenets and available homegrown low-tech knowledge. These practices are rooted in ethos and communicated by orality codes engrained in linguistic categories, metaphors, and dialectic layers. Also, deep-time cultural comprehension, valuable traditional interior design materiality, and space models were relegated by pre-colonial interactions, global acculturations, and language impositions. Coloniality disrupted the kinship essence of indoor spatiality in palaces, while Eurocentric interior design doctrines displaced/impacted homegrown praxis, unique identity, and meanings that define the people. This chapter discourses the ‘notion of the indigenous’, context-based planning principles rooted in traditional practices, and interior design dialectics, and presents culture-based learnings and metaphors that resolve the (mis)conceptions of materiality, and spatial appropriation for well-being in interior architecture. Case study and desk-based methods is underpinned by the historicity of indigenous ideas and practices in selected interiors of ethnic homesteads and palaces, in Southwest Nigeria. Outcomes show that language, the cultural singularity of realms has diversely birthed unique dimensions of interior categorising. The uniqueness/individuality of cultural interior architecture has not been reflected in the uncoordinated attempts for the much-desired decolonisation of indoor space, and redefinition of cruxes of modernity. The attempts for the much-desired effort to decolonise indoor spaces and redefine cruxes of modernity seem to have overlooked the uniqueness/individuality of cultural interior architecture possibilities. By and large, local expressions through fashion, music genres, literary, and film works have blended art forms and identities in the last three decades, but traditional interior design lacks reconceptualisation and creativity. The study highlights the historical role of tangible home layouts, as well as intangible aspects such as metaphor, types, and shadows for stakeholders.