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My answer is B, for the way most of us cook.
1. Smell and smoke: fried plantain, pepper soup and egusi travel. An open kitchen sends all of it into your sofa, your curtains and your visitors' noses.
2. Heat: a gas cooker in an open plan heats the living room too, so the AC works harder.
3. Mess: a closed kitchen can be a working kitchen, with a back door to the yard, and nobody sees the pots.
A is beautiful, though. It works when the cooking is light, the hood is ducted to the outside (not a recirculating one) and the family is small, and it makes a small flat feel bigger.
What I usually design is the middle: a closed main kitchen, plus a small open "show kitchen" or a glazed sliding partition.
What's your preference?
Now, let's talk about bay window details...
The seat: about 450 mm to the top of the cushion (chair height), and 500–600 mm deep so you can sit sideways with your legs up.
The cushion: 75–100 mm of firm foam, or it goes flat within months.
The glass: keep it at least 150 mm above the cushion, so nobody leans back against an opening window.
A hinged lid turns the whole seat into storage.
Here, the bay usually sits on the floor slab cantilevered out, with its own small roof slab, membrane and drip on top.
What would you add or change in the details?
Additional information and sources.
Detail drawn and simplified (Cushion Guide, Window seat dimensions (typical depth 18–24 in / 46–61 cm; about 18 in / 46 cm to the top of the cushion; 3–4 in cushions; keep the seat top about 6 in / 15 cm below the window) cushionguide.com/guides/wind… ·
Fine Homebuilding, Create Beautiful Window Seats (about 1 ft 6 in deep to sit forward, 2 ft to sit sideways; count the cushion in the height) finehomebuilding.com/2018/07… ·
Designing Idea, Window Seat Dimensions (at least 6 in between the seat top and the window, to avoid falls) designingidea.com/window-sea…
Which of these windows did the house you grew up in have?
Most of us grew up with louvres (we call them naco). They let the breeze in all day, but they're hard to seal against rain, dust and burglars, which is why they're disappearing.
In most new houses I see today, sliding windows have taken over. They're cheap and save space, but only half of the window ever opens. Casement and top-hung windows open fully, and a top-hung one can stay open in a storm.
In my opinion, in our climate, ventilation should decide the window, not just the price.
Which one would you choose for your bedroom?
Arcfunmi retweeted
Open kitchen is not fit for Nigerian homes because of our strong spices.
The best you can do is adapt it to fit our needs by using a transparent aluminum sliding door to demarcate the kitchen from the living room - giving the vibe of the open kitchen while protecting your space from the strong smell and heat..
Arcfunmi retweeted
For an African context, I would go with B, Closed kitchen. Our approach to food processing differs completely from the Western world, and no matter our level of exposure, culture plays a vital role in how we perceive our homes, and that is our unique signature.
Arcfunmi retweeted
Heat from cooking especially when there's power failure, the eye saw that comes from disorganized environment while cooking. It's better for someone who makes meal with already processed food and is really organized.
Arcfunmi retweeted
Another building under construction came down in Nairobi on Friday, and the paper trail is the scariest part.....
The county says the only thing it ever approved was a change of use (Oct 2024). The building plans, for 15 storeys plus a basement, were submitted in Nov 2024 and never approved.
Construction reportedly started in June 2025 anyway, and the project was registered with the National Construction Authority in July 2025. NEMA asked for legible drawings in January; they never came, so there was no environmental licence either.
66 of the 67 workers on site came out unharmed, but 31 families have reported relatives missing. My thoughts are with them.
We know this story too well in Lagos. Who do you think should be responsible this disaster?
Arcfunmi retweeted
Spot the fire mistakes in this market plaza...
Tomorrow, CBI News premieres "Burning Point: Inside Lagos' Fires". And earlier this month, Lagos started pulling down the burnt 25-storey GNI House on Lagos Island, where 12 people died after the Christmas Eve fire.
I drew a typical four-storey plaza the way I see them around our markets. I count at least six things that would turn a small fire into a disaster.
How many can you find? My answer follows in a few hours.
Arcfunmi retweeted
Everybody has been arguing about purple kitchens this weekend..... but the colour is the easy part to change. The layout is what you live with every day.
These are the six common layouts, and the one rule they all try to satisfy: the work triangle between the sink, the cooker and the fridge. Each leg should be 1.2 to 2.7 m, and all three together no more than 7.9 m. Leave at least 1.07 m between counters for one cook, and 1.22 m for two.
In my opinion, the galley is the most underrated layout for our flats, and the island is the most abused. An island forced into a small kitchen just leaves you with two narrow aisles.
Which layout is your kitchen, and what would you change about it?
Arcfunmi retweeted
While we keep building glass boxes that need air conditioning all day, the Berber (Amazigh) families of Matmata in southern Tunisia went the other way: they dug their houses into the ground.....
Each home is built around a courtyard pit, typically 5 to 10 m across and about 10 m deep. The rooms are carved sideways out of the pit walls, with vaulted ceilings and 6 to 7 m of earth above them, so they stay cool in summer and warm in winter.
You enter through a sloping tunnel that bends at the end (for privacy and defence), and grain is poured into the upper storerooms through an opening near ground level.
When 22 days of rain in 1969 flooded the area and many of the homes collapsed, most families rebuilt underground anyway. A pit-house hotel there, the Sidi Driss, was used as Luke Skywalker's home in Star Wars.
Would you live in a house like this?
Arcfunmi retweeted
Everybody saves colour palettes; very few people know how much of each colour to use.
The rule interior designers lean on is 60-30-10: about 60% of the room in your dominant colour (usually the walls), 30% in a secondary colour (the sofa, the curtains), and 10% in an accent (cushions, art, a vase).
We drew the same living room in four palettes to show it. Same sofa, same window; only the colours change.
In my opinion, many of our living rooms do it the other way round: the loud accent colour goes on all four walls.
Which palette would you choose for your living room: 1, 2, 3 or 4?
Arcfunmi retweeted
Septic tank details
Well, almost every house in Nigeria has one, yet it's the part of the building nobody asks to see on the drawings: the septic tank, and where its water goes next.
UK practice (image 1): where there's no public sewer, the septic tank has at least two chambers (at least 2,700 litres for up to 4 users) and sits at least 7 m from habitable rooms. It's never the end of the line. The effluent goes into a drainage field of perforated pipes on 300 mm of shingle, at least 15 m from any building and 50 m from any borehole or well.
Nigerian practice (image 2): a two-chamber tank with a baffle wall, vent pipe and RC cover slab, which discharges into a soakaway pit lined with sandcrete blocks laid with gaps, so the water seeps straight into the ground.
My only concern is the borehole. A 2022 study of residential apartments in Ikeja found boreholes 12 metres or less from the septic tanks and soakaways.
How far is your borehole from your soakaway?
Arcfunmi retweeted
Patrick Collison's photo of Wurster Hall at UC Berkeley has passed 400,000 views this weekend.
It houses Berkeley's architecture school, and the university's own website says it is often voted the campus's ugliest building, for its Brutalist, bare-concrete look.
But bare concrete doesn't have to look grim. Its finish depends on what you line the formwork with and what you do to the surface after it hardens.
These are six finishes worth knowing, from smooth and board-marked to bush-hammered and exposed aggregate.
In my opinion, concrete rarely makes a building ugly on its own; stains, poor detailing and zero maintenance do. Even Wurster's concrete sunshades are there to cut energy costs.
Which of these finishes would you use on a new project?
Arcfunmi retweeted
At the ACAN Architects Forum in Lagos, a manufacturer said lightweight concrete slabs could cut steel use and foundation costs... So, let's compare how a concrete floor is made in the UK and here.
UK (image 1): precast beam-and-block, the usual choice for suspended ground floors in new homes. Prestressed concrete beams (typically 150 mm deep) sit on a DPC with 75–100 mm bearing; 440 × 215 × 100 mm blocks drop between them; and the screed goes on top, over a ventilated void of at least 150 mm.
Nigerian (image 2): an in-situ solid slab, typically 150 mm thick, cast with the beams, on planks, 2" × 3" joists, and bamboo props at 600 mm.
In my opinion, we put more concrete and steel into our floors than we need to. In one Structville comparison, a ribbed slab with hollow pots used 53% less concrete and 7% less reinforcement than a solid slab, and came out about 24% cheaper.
