The practice
About CCI
Barzmit Interior Design is an interior architecture consultancy working from Ikoyi, with a project desk in Abuja. The name is our own: Context, Craft, Interior. We were formed in 2014 to hold the plan, the detail, and the made object in one team.
Ikoyi, Lagos · 2025
Our story
Structural mastery, learned on site.
The early work was residential renovation in Victoria Island, where buildings are rarely what the drawings claim. Floor plates step, a column lands in the middle of a future dining room, and the terrace is a slab with no fall for water. We learned to survey before we draw a concept, and to treat the existing building as a co-author. Multi-level houses on the Island taught us sequencing. Marble cannot be polished on level two while wet trades are still open on level one, and a date cannot be promised if the lift shaft is still a suggestion.
Custom sourcing became the second education. A bronze mesh specified from a European sample book is not a bronze mesh that clears the port, survives a humid store, and matches the sample a client signed. We built a procurement desk that tracks finish batches, crate dimensions, and who is liable when a stone vein shifts. Some pieces are made in Lagos. Joiners we trust can hold a tolerance if the shop drawing is honest. Some pieces must travel. The skill is knowing which is which, and ordering the long-lead items before the ceiling is closed.
Cross-continental logistics is unglamorous and decisive. We have held a Banana Island installation because a crate of hand-finished pulls sat in a queue, and we have carried a single stone sample to Abuja so a family could approve a vein in daylight rather than under a showroom lamp. The chronicle of this studio is a record of buildings that were difficult, and finished with the drawing intact.
How a commission moves
Every appointment passes four gates. We do not skip a gate because a deadline is loud.
Comprehensive concept
We begin with how the space must perform. Who arrives, who lives there, what must stay private, and what the climate is doing to the rooms. The concept is a spatial argument: a plan diagram, a material thesis, and a short written brief. Clients approve the argument before fees are spent on detail. A collage of furniture is not a concept.
Technical space planning
Plans are drawn at the scale of furniture and at the scale of services. We coordinate indoor air-conditioning units, drainage falls, lighting circuits, acoustic layers, and the joinery that conceals them. In Nigerian urban buildings this is where a project holds or fails. The ceiling void is rarely as deep as the brochure, and the changeover to generator power is part of the design, not an afterthought for the electrician.
Spatial walkthrough renderings
We model the rooms and walk them. The renderings are a decision tool: daylight at four in the afternoon, the sightline from the entry, the proportion of a banquette. They are not a sales image. When the model and the plan disagree, the plan is revised. Clients approve the model they have walked, and the site is built to match it.
Procurement integrity
Every specified item has a supplier, a lead time, a sample status, and a substitute we would actually accept. We do not swap a stone or a textile on site until the client has seen the alternative in the same light. Millwork is shop-drawn, reviewed, and finished to a written standard. Installation is supervised by the studio.
The drawing is a promise. Procurement is how the promise survives the port, the workshop, and the site.