FOR JEAN SERVAIS Somian, the path to fulfillment has been winding. The renowned designer is famous for transforming wood and everyday African objects into highly original furniture pieces, like his “library trees” made of coconut and his daybeds made of canoes. But he took a number of professional detours before returning to design for good. It’s a fate shaped by his country’s history, his passion for creating domestic objects, and in serendipitous opportunities. Somian was born 50 years ago near Abidjan, in Ivory Coast, West Africa. At 16, he didn’t want to attend school, so he was asked to pick up a trade instead. He chose woodwork since he was living in Grand-Bassam, a city of artisans. After two years, he decided to learn sculpture and found tremendous freedom. “Ebénisterie [woodwork] felt too occidental to me, with a lot of rules and constraints,” Somian recalls. “But sculpture! That was a direct, unfiltered relationship with the material. This practice felt more African to me.”

The young Somian had to leave his country at 19 years old. He made it to Paris, where he found himself with no papers and no job. Hustling his way through, he knocked on the door of a Parisian atelier in the quartier Faubourg Saint-Antoine, a woodworking mecca for over 400 years. He started to work, but the pay was too low. So Somian took other jobs, as a model, boxer, waiter, and security agent. He began to make a good living as a boxer and trained and competed on the French circuit for five years. Interior design and woodwork were the least of his priorities at that point.

Somian now goes back and forth between France and Ivory Coast. At 50, he’s become one of West Africa’s most acclaimed designers, working with all types of wood, metal, leather, plastic, and fabric, offering a large variety of pieces with strong personalities, often repurposing discarded objects. His inspiration lies in nature and in the things that people overlook, like the fisherman’s pirogue — a long, narrow canoe carved in a tree trunk — that he has upcycled into a piece of furniture. “This old fisherman left his pirogue for good because he was too tired to go fishing. It was just lying there and rotting,” he says. “I wanted to add a new chapter to its journey, so I used it as a chassis for a daybed.”

Today, Somian’s mission has a broader dimension: He wants to educate future generations of designers. He created a workshop in Grand-Bassam to teach students the design process, from idea to finished product. He is also planning a design fair that will gather together the industry’s various fields: furniture, fashion, graphic design, and art direction, because “design works holistically. We don’t have a designer fair in West Africa. It’s time to have one!” he says. “I want to teach the younger generations so we can exchange and nurture each other.” If he once rejected the school system, maybe, in the end, it was only so that he could create his own.