Kunle Dina: Undisputed King of Luxury Kitchens

Cosmopolitan in looks, inventive and dogged in his approach to business, Kunle Dina is an ambitious yet selfless interior designer with an appetite for creating breathtaking luxury kitchens for his clients. Dina is the Founder and CEO of Luca Visage Limited, a world-class luxury interior finishing company providing interior design, planning and procurement for his clients. The suave luxury man who once traversed the corporate world first as a banker and later Accenture Group told Funke Olaode his natural progression from corporate into the world of luxury

He is a corporate businessman with eyes for details and he has been constantly tagged the undisputed King of Luxury Kitchens with a magic wand to create a world class luxury interior. Kunle Dina is the face behind Luca Visage Limited. His success story is tied to utilising one’s network to step up.
First, he was part of Accenture Group with tentacles across the West African countries leaving behind trails of achievements before launching his own company. To say Dina is an exceptionally devoted and diligent individual will be an understatement as he generally works effectively towards every task at hand.

Walking into his expansive office in the highbrow Lekki area of Lagos, his magnificent building which houses his many exploits and crafts in interior decoration is breathtaking. It is the headquarters of Luca Visage- a go-to for celebrities who desire to have luxury kitchen in their homes. The sparkling chandeliers complemented the artistic works neatly displayed on the balcony that leads to his cozy office on the left wing of the gigantic building. Classical music oozed from hidden speakers while the mild fragrance rented the air, creating a spectacular ambience in that classy corporate office.

Dressed in a bespoke cream suit, Dina cut the image of a suave businessman. He parades kitchens from world class brands. For instance, his company deals with Italian brands such as Scavolini, his flagship brand with over 40 designs. It comes in different features such as glass, mat, steel and so on. Under it you’d find Baccarat, Giugiaro (a designer of luxury cars such as Ferrari), Libera, Madeleine. Here, it is fully customizable to the client’s style and preference. Walking through the maze of those kitchen fittings was like having a home-within-a-home; befitting for queens, kings, emperors and elites.

A virile, creative mind, Dina’s progression into the design world was natural. After 12 years working for top local and global corporations, he acquired a rare grounding in execution structure and discipline which, combined with his natural flair for style and detail, has earned him a unique MO. This MO has become the hallmark of all Luca Visage projects, form the classic, to the avant-garde.

Prior to founding Luca Visage, Dina was, at first, a corporate banker at the former Universal Trust Bank, Head Office and then, a Strategy and Business Architecture, Corporate Performance Management and Supply Chain Executive at Accenture. He was, in addition, an Instructor and Training Administrator in the Professional Management Education Unit of Accenture (which was Andersen Consulting). He was a Teaching and Research Fellow at the University of Saskatchewan, Canada, where he obtained his Master’s Degree. This was after holding a Bachelor of Science in Economics from Lagos State. He has participated in numerous business, design and construction courses, conferences and exhibitions all over the world.

Dina had been schooled in the arts of money making, discipline and integrity through his lineage. His parents were successful entrepreneurs and his maternal grandfather was one of the wealthiest men of his generation. Dina learnt through them the values of discipline, resilience, hard work, interpersonal relationships, reputation and most importantly, integrity.

Recalling what ignited his entrepreneurial spirit in him, he said: “My Dad was the late Asiwaju of Epe. He was a Mechanical Engineer, trained in the United Kingdom and Japan. He was the Chief Engineer for the Governor’s Office of the Old Western Region, a position which he also held in Ogun State for many more years after the formation of states. He was reputed for his strong principles, his professionalism, work ethics, integrity and human relations. He was also known as a bridge-builder and sophisticated “social-animal” – the life of a party, as his friends fondly referred to him.

“My mum was born into the Quadri Sebiotimo family of Ijebu Ode. My grandfather (her dad) owned the famous Sebiotimo Printing Press and Sebiotimo Bookstores. He was one of the wealthiest industrialists and merchants of his time in Ijebu Ode. He was renowned for his fashion sense and fleet of cars, which was a rarity at the time,’’ he recounted.

His mother grew up on trading trips to Lagos with her own father and having all the money tied to her waist, under her dress, as a young teenage girl.

He continued: “After completing her education at the Paris Institute of Fashion on Oxford Street, London in the sixties, she operated a fashion house in Ibadan for a few years upon my parents’ return to Nigeria before becoming a school teacher and then, a home-maker. My parents later started a Spare Parts importation business after their retirement, the local trading component of which she essentially ran. My mum is an accomplished artist and designer and I am confident that my artistic and design inclinations emanated from her.”

These traits essentially provided the solid foundation and the building block for the individual and the business personality that Dina has become today.

Apart from imbibing the values of integrity, Dina, a native of Epe in Lagos State attests to the fact that being born and raised in the ancient city of Ibadan played a critical role in his life.
He grew up in Ibadan-his place of birth- with his parents. Sadly, his father passed away about 10 years ago. Memories of his birthplace somewhere in Agodi, GRA, Ibadan are very vivid in his mind and often come up in conversations with persons of similar background.

“I was having the same conversation with a client after we closed a deal and we started talking and we realised that we were both from Ibadan. And we then started understanding how it was so easy for us to interact.”
Although Ibadan seems like a laid back environment to grow up in, it was value-oriented as he would later point out.

“People are very content, very self-respecting, very dignified and there wasn’t always an inordinate exhibition of wealth even though most wealthy people are there, you wouldn’t know. We had a lot of friends who didn’t know how wealthy their fathers were until they went to university and they joined clubs. They have a club party in the house and somebody will say, ‘so your daddy is wealthy.’ Even the guy doesn’t know because there is a bit of what I will call class and taste, and all of that. That is the way we grew up and that sort of formed my perspective in terms of disposition towards wealth, towards behaviour and towards attitude, social relations, interacting with people, respecting your word, your contract, all those sort of things.”

Narrating his journey from the corporate world to luxury trade, he observed that despite many offers from corporate and public sectors, he had to listen to himself.

“I decided I wanted to go into enterprise to pursue something that is more natural to me; something that I believe that I was inherently suited to do exceptionally better than the average person. And that was the design. And it’s design coming from my creative intuitions, coming from the natural gifts that I believe that I had in my ability to understand design concepts, virtual things relating to beauty, lights, colours and so on. But the other advantage that I had in addition to having those natural design intuitions has been the ropes of discipline which came from my business background working for banks and working for Accenture. Being an economist by training, I can then take all that natural gifts and be able to execute to specification within timeline, within budget and so on which is something a lot of artistic people learn. I went into design from the construction and the interior design perspective.”

Since he launched, Dina hasn’t disappointed himself with landmark successes such as handling several projects in about five countries. “We have done projects in lighting, projects involving tiles or slabs. On one of those occasions, we supplied 42 containers and then turnkey. Turnkey meaning everything required in the building. So that is our B2B division, and then we have a B2C, business to consumer, where we deal with individual customers at the retail level. And in that space we represent some international brands. For example, Scavolini which has been the number one Italian kitchen company for 35 years now. So within Scavolini, for example, we have kitchens, bathrooms and so on. The kitchen is our flagship operation in that space. So, that is what we do essentially.”
Incidentally, Dina is a self-taught designer who is also very artistic.

“I can paint your portrait to look exactly like you. I am also a writer actually, but that is on the side, I have a completely different personality from my writing. In addition to being self-taught, I have attended design trade, conferences and exhibitions all over the world, virtually all the continents of the world. Some of the times I do up to 12 to 15 trips per year, just soaking up what is there, what is relevant and reading all the books. I am working on projects with some of the best minds when it comes to design both locally and internationally. That has put me in a position where I think I eventually learnt informally what I probably would have learnt formally in an institution.”
A very talented, focused and team player, Dina as the final custodian of the vision at Luca Visage believes he should stand as a shining example for his team. Primarily, he gives that inspiration in terms of what exactly the company represents. He also gives direction in terms of where their standards are, what the clients expect, who the client is, what they have promised them and what they deliver to them.

“On a day-to-day basis, it is usually just making sure that people do what they are assigned to do. In many cases, I mean that is not necessary, because people are well aware of their responsibilities and they are exceptionally inspired. At the same time, someone has to oversee and ensure, test and check and make sure that things are going according to plan. But more importantly what I enjoy doing the most is spending time with our extremely sophisticated, extremely discerning clients, ensuring that they have the correct experience because we are not only selling products, we are selling an experience.”

Dina believes as a businessman, there will always be challenges as “the most intuitive thing to do is go to investment banking, asset management consulting. Those challenges were there and then people trying to understand whether or not you are really just doing this in an opportunistic way or if you are actually committed. But I think ultimately the way we have surmounted those challenges was in our delivery. It is in our definition of the client requirement and our ability to meet those.”
How has Dina’s experience as a corporate man helped his journey as his own boss, you may ask? With a tone of conviction, he replied softly, “Very much so, very much. When we started this conversation I told you that many people who go into luxury are people of style, people of class, they have tracks and many of them are creative. But some of the time with that comes an absence of discipline and structure. There is a difference between creativity and structure. Creativity is free, but structure is rigid.

“I have been lucky by virtue of my previous experiences to have been able to forge my creativity through the fires of structure and discipline and the ability to execute within the time frame, to execute according to specifications, to work within a budget. So, all of that has helped me and obviously my company, to be able to operate in a much disciplined structure in terms of meeting our customers’ needs. Of course, there are also key aspects like human resource management, finance management or just understanding the requirements in all those places. All of those come from my experience in the corporate world and a strictly business background.”

Luxury items don’t come cheap but Dina said there is space for everyone in his company. “We are affordable,’’ he insisted. “Mind you, affordability is relative to value. Value is the most paramount aspect. I say price is only relevant when someone does not know what you want to acquire or they are not committed to what they want to acquire. Like the saying goes, quality is what remains long after price has been forgotten. Once you are getting quality, price becomes essentially irrelevant.”
Dina believes that his company has made fairly humble achievements over the past 14 years establishing itself as a company of world class quality. “And we hope to sustain that over the coming years,” he stated.