GridWork Office
Office fit-out · Ash veneer + Black powder-coated steel · Creative agency, Ikeja, Lagos
the process
Client
Grid Creative Agency — brand and digital studio, Ikeja, Lagos
Brief
We want workstations that feel as considered as the work we produce. Six identical desks, a reception counter, and a director's table. The language across all three should be consistent — the space should feel curated, not assembled from different sources.
Material Direction
Client referenced: light timber, black steel, clean lines
Timeline
8 weeks, staggered delivery — director's table first
Budget Tier
Full Workshop Fit-out tier
Our Response
Grid Creative is a studio where work and environment are inseparable. The brief was not about furniture — it was about designing a workspace that reflected the agency’s standards.
We developed a consistent material language: light ash veneer tabletops, thin black powder-coated steel frames, and exposed bolt detailing at the joints as a design feature rather than a hidden fastener.
Six workstations: 1600mm wide, cable management integrated into the rear modesty panel, monitor arm mount points pre-drilled. Reception counter: curved front panel in matching ash veneer, steel frame, integrated cable point for the display. Director’s table: 2000mm x 900mm, single slab veneer, same steel language, delivered first so the director could work from it before the full fit-out was complete.
All six workstations were built from the same template — identical dimensions, identical joint detailing, identical finish. When installed in a row, they read as a single continuous piece of design.
Work in Progress
Delivery Story
The director’s table was delivered on a Tuesday and installed within three hours. The full fit-out — six workstations and reception counter — followed three weeks later, installed over a single working day. Grid Creative’s director sent us a photograph of the space the morning after install: ‘This is exactly what we wanted. The room finally makes sense.’
GridWork Office
Jigs & tooling · Steel + Aluminium · Small furniture workshop, Lafia, Nasarawa State
the process
Client
Lafia Craft Workshop — small commercial furniture workshop, Lafia, Nasarawa State
Brief
We make chairs. We make them one at a time and each one is slightly different from the last because we have no jigs. We need a set of jigs for the three most repeated operations in our production process: seat rail drilling, backleg angle cutting, and stretcher positioning. We want each chair to be identical.
Material Direction
Steel body, aluminium registration plates — precision required
Timeline
3 Weeks
Budget Tier
Craft Commission tier
Our Response
This commission was different from every other project in our portfolio. The client was not buying a piece of furniture — they were buying precision. The jigs we built would be used thousands of times, and every chair produced with them would carry the quality of our work.
We visited the Lafia workshop before designing anything. Three days observing their production process, measuring their most common chair frame, identifying the three operations that introduced the most variation: seat rail drilling angle, backleg compound angle cut, and stretcher centreline positioning.
The result: three dedicated jigs. Jig 1 — Seat Rail Drill Guide: steel body, two aluminium registration plates, four fixed drill bushings at 8mm and 10mm for the standard rail cross-section. Jig 2 — Backleg Angle Saw Guide: adjustable steel fence on a heavy base, set at 5° compound taper, referenced from the leg face. Jig 3 — Stretcher Positioning Frame: open steel rectangle at standard stretcher span, self-clamping to the leg pair.
All three jigs were built with replaceable wear components — the drill bushings, the fence face plates, and the clamp faces are all standard-dimension replaceable parts available from any engineering supplier.
Work in Progress
Delivery Story
The three jigs were dispatched to Lafia by road freight, packed in a purpose-built timber case with each jig nestled in cut foam. A two-page instruction card was included for each jig. Three weeks after delivery, the workshop supervisor sent us a WhatsApp message: ‘We made 12 chairs this week. Every one is the same. Thank you.’ That message is saved.