Hi, I’m Nike, and welcome to
my sweet digs, my labor of love. Come on in. I’m an interior designer, and my
company is called Ode, Studio Ode, and it’s all based
around holistic design and looking at design from
a different perspective. I like to say that I am a spatial
artist, because my canvass happens to be people’s homes, and my mediums happen to be
furniture and rugs and textiles, and paint. So I am a designer of space. I’ve own this place for 12 years, but I recently moved in
and did a huge renov. Because, this place is quite small, although it’s
800 square feet, it’s chopped up, there’s rooms, but I wanted
the space to feel open, which I think it does. This is my kitchen, one of my
absolute favorite places in my home. People say their kitchen
is the heart of their home. I’m going to say that mine is the soul. It really just speaks to a lot of things that I have been going
through personally in my life. So a lot of the design is
focused around this duality between yin and yang, light and dark,
good and bad, those are the things, and embracing it as a whole. So the peninsula is light, I’ve encased
the entire thing in this Detolf material, which is pretty cool, because
it’s literally indestructible, I could light this on
fire, cut directly on it, do all sorts of things to
it, and it is perfectly fine. And then the backdrop,
the cabinets, the back splash, everything has this
really dark rich tone to it, so it really allows
everything else to pop off of it. And, the gold accents, because you also
have to have a little gold in everything. The other thing I really love that
requires no renovation whatsoever, but is completely
functional, is this right here, it is an Ikea product called Bergenes, it’s made of renewable
bamboo material, and all it does, is hold your phone. I know it’s really simple,
but when I’m cooking, Facetiming with my mom
when I don’t know what I’m doing, it literally just keeps my phone
where I need it to be at all times. This is my bedroom
where I reset and recharge. This space really needed
to be relaxing for me. And I have this sort of love
language with willow trees, so I wanted to feel like I was
sleeping under a willow tree. When things feel chaotic, I tend
to go to things that are absolute, things that don’t change,
and for me, that’s nature. So you see, I have murals
throughout the entire space. And as soon as I walk in here,
it’s almost like I take a breath. It’s like, huh, all that kind of
just makes me feel grounded. And then keeping in vain with this
whole movement and flow of the space, everything is curved. And this is a piece of my paper collection. You can actually sit on it, not in this
fashion, you have to turn it around, but it adds another element
of that curve, to the space. This is my bathroom,
and when I designed it, I wanted to feel like I was
bathing outside in Morocco. Like the bedroom, I wanted the bathroom
to feel like another place to unwind, and that’s why I have everything monotone. So I have floor, ceiling tile in
this kind of like marbled concrete. The tub is custom
built, and blends into like all the tile that’s going on,
and then the same gold finishes that we have in the kitchen, this curved glass that makes you
feel like there’s nothing even there, and this mirror that kind of blends in, you have the faucet coming
out of it, so it’s really sexy, again, with the willow trees. And then this knife edge lighting, I love the way it feels in here, it reminds me of being
on vacation or in a spa. Both of them are very good. This is my dining area and I'm
really looking forward to getting some good use out of this space
once we can see people again. My dining room was one of the
easiest things to design in my space, it kind of just came
together on its own. I found this table on
Facebook Marketplace for $100, which is a steal considering I found
this same table at a store for $1,500. I might rough it up a little
bit and give it a little texture, take away the shine, but it just
adds a lot of warmth to the space and makes it feel a little bit more homey. One of the things that I
wanted to change in moving here was, I had a lot of décor items
that I didn’t feel connected to. So in coming into the space,
I needed pieces that spoke to me because they told a
story just by sitting there. And my sconce, oh, this
is one of those pieces. I found this fabric in Mexico
and it's actually a shawl that you wear it like
a piece of clothing, but it reminds me of
something called Ìrùkèrè. I'm Nigerian from Yoruba descent and there's this chieftain accessory, it looks kind of like a horse’s tail but it has the same
texture and when I saw this, it totally reminded me of it and it
brought me back to my childhood when we would dance with
it, so I knew when I saw it that I needed to
bring it home with me. And yeah, just drape it on the
sconce and give it a little bit of life. My living room is where
I spend a lot of my time, it functions for so
many different purposes. I work here, I work out here, it's kind of like my mini
gym when I need it to be. It is light, it is airy
and it is totally inviting. The lighting here is phenomenal. I am south facing,
so I get full sunlight all day long, which I love, but it can
also get really hot in here. So one of the things that
was really important to me was to have some sort of light control. So I have these
FYRTUR blinds from Ikea, amazing automatic blinds
made from recycled polyester so they're sustainable,
and the cool thing is you can control it from
an app on your phone individually or together. Pretty cool, huh? The sofa is probably
my most expensive item. I'm not sure if it's 100% the
right choice for the space, now I feel like I need
something that’s a little bit softer, something where you just want
to sink into it and like never leave. But I'm still loving it. This wall is all about function. It is floor to ceiling cabinetry. There's not a lot of storage in the space so I wanted to make sure that I had
something that kind of captured everything, but also looked great. So we have the black interior with
the white paneling on the outside. I used the same cabinet doors in
a different finish for this paneling. I just cut them to size so that it
kind of had this little cool detail, it plays off of the sofa
and it just looks really great. When you allow yourself the
space to connect with items, I think they last
longer in your home so you're not throwing
away things as often or replacing things as often
and we just have a greener world. And in a more organic
way, we’re living sustainably. When I work with
people, I challenge them, I ask them to kind of dig deep so that I can get to the heart of what
it is that we’re actually creating. And when I started
designing space for myself, I had to do that same thing.
It was super uncomfortable, super vulnerable and I hate
that sometimes, really annoying. But in me creating this home,
it was very much about starting life now, taking full bites and living
life to the absolute fullest. That’s why there's a lot of openness, inviting a lot of things into my space. So yeah, very weird designing
for myself, very difficult. I'm going to take a break from doing it because it leaves me super vulnerable, but I love the results, I love my home. Thanks so much for stopping by
and checking out my sweet digs. See you later.
