Febal Casa Makes Strategic Move in Lagos

MILAN — Lagos, Nigeria, a city at the forefront of the ongoing West African renaissance, is the latest design frontier, as evidenced by Italy’s Febal Casa, which opened its first store there in the first half of 2024, the company said Thursday.

Overall in the period, the luxury furniture maker opened 14 new stores, nine of which were in Italy and five of which were abroad, with new storefronts in Beirut and Cape Town. Colombini Group, which took over Febal Casa in 2009, said the Nigerian consumer base is ready to embrace Italian luxury design. Febal Casa partnered with a local partner, Interstyle, a professional player in the region.

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“This strategy clearly matches the expansion into the African market, where Nigeria is the largest and richest economy, as well as a market in which the ‘Attainable Premium’ positioning of Febal Casa represents a fantastic opportunity for the Nigerian upper class, in order to explore the Made in Italy luxurious design at reasonable prices,” said Colombini Group’s chief executive officer Giovanni Battista Vacchi.

“Nigeria is a market where we see many future investments in premium to luxury residential multi-unit apartments as well as luxurious villas compounds, and we know we would be the best provider of Italian furniture for all these clients and developers,” Vacchi added.

Febal Casa was founded in 1959 and has collaborated with key players in the design and architecture worlds like Matteo Thun and Daniel Libeskind.

Aside from its consumption potential, the Nigerian diaspora’s influence has spread worldwide in the fields of sports, fashion, film and music, particularly Afrobeats, which emanated from Nigeria, Ghana and the U.K. in the 2000s and 2010s. According to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, about one out of every four Africans as of today is Nigerian.

Furniture designers like Nifemi Marcus-Bello, the founder of Lagos’ Nmbello Studio, for example, most recently garnered acclaim at Design Miami 2023 with his latest creations made of sand-cast aluminum — functional sculptures made in a local auto-parts foundry.

Febal Casa said it’s on track to reach a landmark number of 203 monobrand stores in total, of which 30 will be abroad.

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