As featured in May 1996
Truth-in-Design
Traditional Interiors from African Home, Inc.
From decorative pillows to shower curtains to wallcoverings, African Home Incorporated makes a unique statement in the American Home Textiles market, with its manufacture, design, and distribution of Afrocentric home and office furnishings.
The company's proprietary product is African-inspired wallcoverings. A total of 12 patterns are completed. The wallcoverings have the distinction and recognition of being selected for the African-American Design Archives of the Cooper-Hewitt Museum of Design (Smithsonian Institute).
African Home's decorative pillow line is equally
exciting, turning a simple home furnishing accessory into an accent that
can make any room a "showstopper."
Cheryle Williams Dent, founder and company president, used to practice interior design as a hobby until she started the company in 1989. In 1990, African Home merged with New World Fabric Supply, owned and operated by Kim Bressant-Kibwe. New World was avant-garde, one of the first in its field to import and distribute African textiles in the American market.
Cheryle is a graduate of the State University of New York at Albany. While a speech major at SUNY, Cheryle became known as the "Campus Decorator." Prior to establishing American Home, she worked with Merrill Lynch as a sales representative for the financial house.
Kim is a graduate of Cornell University and Georgetown University Law Center. A member of the New York Bar and a Chartered Life Underwriter (CLU), she practiced law and worked as an estate and business planning consultant with The Equitable and CNA Insurance Companies and travelled extensively throughout Africa during that time.
African designs are now in "vogue" in the home furnishings market largely through the efforts of companies like African Home Inc. T
he company's premiere collection started with four designs: Amandla, Benin, Cornstalk, and the Crest of Africa. "Amandla," which means freedom, was designed to celebrate the demise of apartheid. In this wallcovering pattern, a diamond shaped Adinkra symbol, which represents freedom, is repeated in a vertical fashion to create a stripe effect.
"Benin" depicts a warrior's shield.
The concentric pattern suggests the unrelenting courage and strength of
the African warrior.
"Cornstalk" is a symbol of bounty. The repeated images of shafts of wheat depict the harvest season, which is a very joyous occasion for people all over the African continent.
A desire to develop an African-American "Coat of Arms," led to the development of the "Crest of Africa." Traditional components are repeated in a strong image of the Benin Head surrounded by elephant leaf cactus sitting atop a ribbon trimmed with stylized Ashanti stools. The baobab tree on the lower half of the Crest is positioned above tiger orchids and is surrounded by other flora indigenous to Africa.
These designs in the first volume of fabrics by African Home won the 1994 Estar Award for wallcovering design. Recently African Home again won a coveted 1996 Estar Award for design excellence in its new licensed collection, "L'Odyssee Africaine," featured in the wallpaper book distributed by Gramercy, a home furnishing company with a line of wallpaper products and accessories.
"L'Odyssee Africaine" is comprised of 20th century interpretations of the beauty and exotica of the "cradle of mankind," including animals of the wild, botanical wonders, abstract and geometric patterns of awesome imagination, references to objects of art, and wondrous colors.
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