At home with the woman carpenter

With beautiful smiles, demeanour of an ex-beauty queen, and soft voice, you will mistake her for a broadcaster. Even when she walks pass you, the gentility of her well-calculated steps does not say otherwise.

Yet, she is one of the few women who successfully ventured into a male dominated profession and turned it around.

Welcome to the world of Agatha Eric-Udorie, a foremost carpenter, interior decorator, and entrepreneur.

‘‘I am proud to be a carpenter,’’ she tells me during a recent interview. Of course, the CEO of Agatha Interiors Limited, is gifted, and handles tools better than her male counterpart in the carpentry work.

Explaining further her love for carpentry, she says: “I like making furniture; I am proud to be a carpenter. Carpentry is about knowing how to use your tools. And if you use your tools well with the many innovations we have today, you really don’t have to be scared of the men.”

For the interior designer, carpentry is about using bolts, nuts, screws and hinges, and different types of joints. “Once you can identify the area of carpentry, for instance, if you want to produce a sofa, you know that from the skeleton work to the frame and to the upholstery, as far as you know it, you can carve a niche out for yourself. You do not have a problem being a carpenter,” she enthuses.

But, she is not one of those carpenters who opted for handiwork due to the inability to do well in the classroom. She is a typical beauty with brain who through hard work and perseverance has moved on from a mere carpenter to an interior decorator, and today, she is a designer.

That perseverance is evident in her new office complex and flagship showroom opened recently at #200 Awolowo Road, Ikoyi. The ultramodern office and showroom of Agatha Interiors Limited is worth a visit. The showroom is for the refined taste. It features sleek, yet contemporary pieces for those who appreciate the high-end pieces. From beds, living and dining sets to home accents, they can fill a home.

However, it is coming after over 25 years of hard work that unleashed breathtaking creative designs that wooed and is still making customers for the gifted Agatha and her team of professionals.

Out of the 25 years, the interior designing company has operated as a registered company for 20 years. “We started 25 years ago. But Agatha’s Interior was registered after the five years of my career. You know in those days, we didn’t know how to write business plan; we didn’t know how to register company. We operated with different names that we wanted to use. Agatha’s Interior was registered in 1994. At a point in time, we used to have a workshop at Okubaba Edute-Metta, Lagos. And I actually learnt a lot from the boys in the sawing department then. You know the guys planed the woods. I learnt a lot from them, they taught me how to cut the woods: whether it is 2×2, 4×4, 1×12 inches of woods – different types they taught me as long as I was willing to learn,” she explains.

On her drive and passion for furniture, Agatha says: “I love to decorate homes, I love home. So, I have to make my own furniture because I couldn’t afford to buy from the magnificent in those days. So, I had to start something gradually and that is what brought me to this point.”

Her outfit is proudly Nigeria and is responding to the call for local content creation. We source our raw materials from all over Nigeria. We’ve a substantial amount of local contents in our business.

Basically, we source our raw materials locally. The ankara is coming back. We just finished an exhibition with the theme: ‘‘Going Back To Your Root.’’ I hope in a couple of months we can start to display a little bit of ankara furniture we are about to start producing,” she discloses.

But all she is asking is for Nigerians to patronise home-groomed designs in order to sustain skills, creativity, create more jobs, and also discourage importation.

Obinna Emelike