Ebun House once stood at 85 Odunfa Street on Lagos Island, rising above its surroundings with an architectural confidence that made it one of the most memorable private residences in the history of the city. Constructed in 1913 for the wealthy auctioneer Andrew Wilkinson Thomas, the mansion combined the ambitions of Lagos’s emerging African commercial elite with architectural traditions shaped by movements of people and ideas across West Africa, Sierra Leone and Brazil.
The house was remarkable not simply because of its size. Its elaborate façade, multiple storeys, ornate plasterwork and commanding presence made it a public landmark even though it was privately owned. Lagosians responded to the building in a particularly revealing way: they incorporated it into popular language.
Two names became closely associated with it, Pẹ̀tẹ́si Anduru, meaning approximately “Andrew’s upstairs”, and Ilé Àwòṣífìlà, commonly interpreted as the house that could make a viewer’s cap fall off while looking upwards at its extraordinary height.
By the 1970s, however, the great mansion had begun to deteriorate. Within the following decade, it was gone, destroyed by fire in the 1980s. What survives today are photographs, written descriptions and scholarly studies of one of Lagos’s most distinctive lost buildings.
How Atlantic Migration Changed the Architecture of Lagos
The construction of Ebun House occurred during an extraordinary period in Lagos’s architectural history.
During the nineteenth century, the city became home to communities whose experiences stretched far beyond the West African coast. Among them were the Sàró, Africans and their descendants who arrived in Lagos through Sierra Leone, many of whom had connections to people liberated from slave ships or resettled in Freetown during the nineteenth century.
EXPLORE NOW: Biographies & Cultural Icons of Nigeria
Lagos also received substantial numbers of Afro-Brazilian and Afro-Cuban returnees, generally known locally as Àgùdà. Some had experienced enslavement in the Americas, while others were their descendants. They returned with trades, religious traditions, commercial connections and building skills developed across the Atlantic world.
Architecture became one of the most visible consequences of these movements.
Afro-Brazilian builders introduced and adapted elaborate masonry techniques that helped transform the physical appearance of Lagos. Multi-storey residences with stucco façades, decorative columns, balconies, large windows, central staircases and ornate plasterwork increasingly appeared across parts of the city.
These were not simply Brazilian houses transplanted unchanged onto African soil. Builders and patrons adapted architectural ideas to Lagosian circumstances, producing structures that reflected several overlapping cultural and technical traditions.
By the early twentieth century, imposing residences had also become statements of achievement among wealthy African merchants and professionals.
Few expressed that new confidence as dramatically as Ebun House.
Andrew Wilkinson Thomas and the Building of Ebun House
The man behind the house was Andrew Wilkinson Thomas, born in 1856 and later known as a prosperous Lagos auctioneer.
In 1913, Thomas commissioned the mansion that would become his most enduring association with the history of Lagos. Architectural historian Adedoyin Teriba identifies Thomas as the patron who employed his cousin Herbert Macaulay, an architect and surveyor, together with the Afro-Brazilian craftsman and builder Balthazar dos Reis, in the creation of the residence.
The formal name carried deep personal meaning.
Thomas had the words “Ẹ̀bùn House” placed on an arch at the entrance. Ẹ̀bùn means “gift” in Yoruba, and family testimony recorded by historians connects the name with Thomas’s belief that the residence represented a gift or blessing from God.
The choice reveals something important about great houses in colonial Lagos. They could simultaneously express wealth, faith, family identity and social advancement.
Ebun House was therefore more than an expensive residence. It was a carefully fashioned statement about its owner and the position he had achieved.
Herbert Macaulay Before His Political Fame
The history of the mansion also reveals a less frequently discussed side of Herbert Macaulay.
Macaulay would later become one of the most influential Nigerian political figures of the colonial period and a prominent critic of British colonial administration. Before much of the political activism for which he is remembered, however, he had established himself professionally as a surveyor and engineer.
He worked in the Lagos Public Works Department before travelling to England for further technical training between 1890 and 1893.
His involvement with Ebun House therefore belonged to the professional phase of his career and demonstrates that Macaulay’s historical importance extended beyond nationalist politics.
Working alongside him was Balthazar dos Reis, an Afro-Brazilian craftsman associated with Lagos’s highly skilled community of Àgùdà builders.
Teriba identifies dos Reis as a major figure in the execution or supervision of the mansion’s construction. Ebun House should therefore be understood as the result of collaboration between a wealthy African patron, a Sàró professional and an Afro-Brazilian builder.
That combination tells an important story about the cosmopolitan society developing in Lagos at the beginning of the twentieth century.
The Architecture That Towered Over Odunfa Street
Surviving descriptions and photographs show why the building made such an impression.
Ebun House was constructed of brick covered with stucco. Its exterior incorporated decorative mouldings, pilasters, elaborate capitals and floral relief work. Wooden louvres and Venetian-style windows contributed to the complexity of its façade.
A balustraded terrace formed another distinctive feature, while a cupola once crowned the structure before its later removal.
The western façade faced Odunfa Street, presenting an imposing appearance to people moving through the surrounding neighbourhood.
A 1975 guide to Lagos described the house when it was still standing. Although its condition had already deteriorated, the guide drew attention to its imposing gateway, heavily colonnaded terraces and balconies, decorative reliefs, carved wooden banisters and columns.
The building belonged unmistakably to the broader Afro-Brazilian architectural tradition for which sections of old Lagos were once famous.
Its height made it even more memorable. In a neighbourhood where many buildings were considerably lower, the mansion must have seemed exceptionally imposing.
Lagosians soon found their own ways of expressing that impression.
Pẹ̀tẹ́si Anduru: When a House Entered Popular Language
Perhaps the greatest indication of Ebun House’s cultural impact was linguistic rather than architectural.
Residents called the building Pẹ̀tẹ́si Anduru, which has been rendered as “Andrew’s upstairs”. The nickname linked the extraordinary structure directly to its owner while emphasising the novelty of its height.
Another expression was even more evocative.
READ MORE: Ancient & Pre-Colonial Nigeria
The mansion became known as Ilé Àwòṣífìlà, commonly interpreted as “the house that makes you lose your cap when admiring its height”.
The image is memorable: a person standing below the building and tilting his head backwards so far to see its upper levels that his cap falls away.
Architect David Aradeon recorded a somewhat different rendering of the expression, “House of secrets, remove your hat”, showing that interpretations of the phrase have varied. What remains consistent is the sense of wonder, respect and magnificence attached to the mansion.
Another popular expression compared anything exceptionally impressive with Andrew’s great house.
A private residence had therefore become something much larger. It had entered the vocabulary through which Lagosians described extraordinary size and grandeur.
Pierre Verger’s Photograph of a Changing Lagos
One of the most important surviving visual records of the building comes from Pierre Verger, the French photographer and ethnographer whose extensive work documented societies on both sides of the Atlantic.
A photograph attributed to Verger and dated to approximately the 1970s shows Ebun House decades after its construction.
By then, the Lagos around it had changed substantially.
The building itself had also changed.
The 1975 Guide to Lagos reported that the original family was no longer using the mansion in its earlier form. The property had been divided among tenants, and deterioration had set in.
Yet enough of its elaborate architecture remained for observers to recognise the residence as one of the city’s striking surviving examples of Brazilian-influenced architecture.
The Verger photograph is therefore more than an attractive image of old Lagos. It records an architectural landmark during the final period of its existence.
The Reputation as Lagos’s First Three-Storey Building
Ebun House has long been remembered in Lagos historical literature as the first three-storey building in Lagos.
The description became deeply attached to the mansion’s historical identity and reflects the exceptional impression its height made upon generations of Lagos residents.
Its significance, however, goes beyond any single architectural record.
Ebun House belonged to a period when wealthy Africans were increasingly using architecture to project prosperity, education, cosmopolitanism, religious faith and social confidence.
The building demonstrated that elite African residents of colonial Lagos were not merely living within a city created by colonial authorities. They were actively shaping its architecture and contributing to the development of a distinctive urban identity.
Ebun House became one of the most visible expressions of that transformation.
The Final Years of Ebun House
By the 1970s, many historic buildings in old Lagos faced uncertain futures.
Changing patterns of ownership, redevelopment, population growth and inadequate conservation contributed to the disappearance of numerous significant structures.
Ebun House suffered the same fate.
The 1975 description of the property already portrayed a building in decline. Its former residential arrangement had changed, tenants occupied parts of the mansion, and deterioration was becoming increasingly visible.
There were proposals to renovate the house and adapt it for use as an art gallery. Such a conversion could have preserved one of Lagos’s most significant historic residences while giving it a new public purpose.
The plan was never realised.
The Fire That Destroyed a Lagos Landmark
Ebun House was destroyed by fire in the 1980s.
Its loss erased one of the most dramatic surviving physical examples of the architectural world created by Sàró and Afro-Brazilian communities in Lagos.
The destruction was particularly significant because so much of the city’s nineteenth and early twentieth-century architecture was already disappearing under the pressures of redevelopment and neglect.
A building that had survived colonial rule, changing occupants and decades of urban transformation disappeared within a single decade.
Photographs subsequently became some of the most important surviving records of the mansion’s appearance.
The fire therefore removed more than an old private residence. It destroyed a physical document of Lagos’s social and architectural history.
Why Ebun House Still Matters to Lagos History
The importance of Ebun House extends beyond nostalgia for a vanished city.
The mansion represents the complicated Atlantic history of Lagos.
Its patron belonged to the prosperous African commercial elite of colonial Lagos. Herbert Macaulay represented the emergence of technically trained African professionals who would later play major political roles. Balthazar dos Reis represented the Afro-Brazilian craftsmen whose work helped reshape architectural traditions across Lagos and parts of south-western Nigeria.
Their collaboration produced a building that was simultaneously Lagosian and international.
EXPLORE: Nigerian Civil War
British colonial rule formed the political backdrop, but the architectural identity of the house cannot be understood simply as British colonial architecture. Its appearance drew heavily from traditions developed through the movement of Africans and their descendants between West Africa and Brazil.
Lagosians then transformed the mansion culturally by giving it Yoruba names and expressions.
Ebun House therefore demonstrates that colonial-era Lagos was not merely receiving cultural influences from Europe. Africans and members of the African diaspora were themselves creating new forms of urban culture.
Conclusion
Ebun House rose at 85 Odunfa Street, Lagos, in 1913 as the residence of auctioneer Andrew Wilkinson Thomas. Herbert Macaulay and Balthazar dos Reis were central to its creation, bringing together Sàró professional experience and Afro-Brazilian building traditions in one of the city’s most celebrated houses.
Its ornate façade, impressive scale and unusual height made it a landmark. Its names, Pẹ̀tẹ́si Anduru and Ilé Àwòṣífìlà, show how deeply it entered popular consciousness.
By the 1970s, the mansion was deteriorating, even as photographers and writers continued to recognise its architectural importance. Plans for preservation came too late. Fire destroyed the building in the 1980s.
The structure disappeared, but its historical importance survived.
Ebun House remains a powerful reminder that the making of modern Lagos was shaped not only by colonial governments and European institutions, but also by African patrons, professionals, migrants and craftsmen whose ambitions were written directly into the city’s streets.
Author’s Note
The story of Ebun House reveals how architecture can preserve the history of migration, ambition and cultural exchange even after a building itself has disappeared. Andrew Wilkinson Thomas’s mansion brought together Sàró and Afro-Brazilian influences at a moment when Lagos was becoming one of West Africa’s most dynamic cities. Its extraordinary appearance impressed residents so deeply that they transformed the house into language, while its eventual destruction illustrates the vulnerability of historic urban landmarks. Remembering Ebun House means remembering the African patrons, professionals and craftsmen who helped create the visual identity of modern Lagos.
References
Adedoyin Teriba, “Architecture, Freedom and Professional Societies in Brazil in the 18th and 19th Centuries: A Prolegomena,” 3rd Text Africa, No. 13, January 2023.
Ayodeji Ogunnaike, “The Transcontinental Genealogy of the Afro-Brazilian Mosque,” MAVCOR Journal, Yale University.
E. Seriki and E. Pullybank, Guide to Lagos, 1975.
O. A. Akinyeye, Eko: Landmarks of Lagos, Nigeria, Mandilas Group Limited, Lagos, 1999.
Moji D. Alonge, “The Progress of the Conservation of Historic Architecture in Lagos, Nigeria: A Critical Observation,” Open House International, Vol. 17, 1992.
David Aradeon, “Planning Lagos: The Unmaking of Tradition,” Glendora Review, 1996.
Tekena N. Tamuno, Herbert Macaulay, Nigerian Patriot, Heinemann Educational Books, 1975.
