He’s one of L.A.’s top architects, with award-winning modern buildings from California to the Persian Gulf and West Africa. Her bright and buttery-leather handbags have caught the attention of Hollywood celebrities. They are father and daughter, Steven and Onna Ehrlich, and they didn’t see each other for the first 19 years of her life. It wasn’t until the woman they both loved, her mother, died in an accident that they were able to connect in an emotional reunion.

In the early 1970s, when Steven Ehrlich was working as an architect and a teacher in Africa, he was enamored with the continent and with one person in particular Grace Okozala, a Nigerian businesswoman. Her sense of adventure enchanted him when they met in 1975 at a university gathering. In 1977，when their daughter, Onna, was just a few months old, Ehrlich left Nigeria and returned to Los Angeles. “I knew that I was leaving part of me behind，” Ehrlich says. “And yet I knew that I had to go follow my path.” He launched what is now a world-class architecture firm.

Okozala raised Onna on her own and Ehrlich sent his daughter letters, called her and helped support her. But Onna missed her father all the same. “I grew up my whole life in Nigeria loving this person, looking up to this person,” Onna says. “And there was this long hunger-I would dream of the day I would meet my dad.”

Then one day in 1995, Okozala, who traded dried goods, went on one of her frequent business trips. “She left the house and said, Til be right back". ”Onna remembers. “She kissed my sister and me. I'll see you in a couple of days.”’ But Okozala never came home. The family later learned that she had died in a bus accident.

Twelve years later, Onna, a breezy, positive 32-year-old, sees her father, 63, nearly every day. She runs her handbag business out of a snug design studio upstairs from his airy, 35-person Culver City, Calif, architecture firm. Father and daughter have found a rhythm. Twice a month, over a Nigerian lunch that Onna makes at home and brings to work, the two relax, laugh and talk shop.

The clutches, hobos and shoulder bags Onna designs with her husband and business partner, Joel Bell, have adorned the arms of celebrities such as Cameron Diaz and Paris Hilton. She says that dozens of stores, fixjm Lord & Taylor to the Los Angeles boutique Kitson, carry the line, priced &om $ 45 to $ 850. “It is a conservative but fashionable bag" says Kitson’s Dean Khial. “It’s for the aspirational customer who wants to have a hot bag but doesn’t want to spend $1,500 or $ 1,800 for a Louis Vuitton. The price is right for the economic times we，re dealing with right now.”

Pricing is pertinent for the father’s work, too. Over his career, Ehrlich has emerged as a prime practitioner of the “design-build” method, which involves collaboration between architect and builder from the project’s start to save time and money. Ehrlich used it for one of his most recent projects, Arizona State University^ Walter Cronkite School of Journalism.

Ehrlich calls his style “multicultural modern-ism' It’s embodied in the 35,000-square-foot Persian Gulf home he designed with a roof shaped like the Islamic crescent moon and in his own Venice, Calif,, home, where mechanically retractable orange-and-yellow awnings, inspired by Moroccan souks and courtyards, shade the lap pool below.

Recently, when Ehrlich was invited to work on a project in the Nigerian capital, Abuja, he asked Onna to go along. They visited the first building he ever designed, a theater in Zaria, and together jumped onto the stage. “It was a very emotional trip to be back there with her for the first time,” Ehrlich recalls. “It was a very big, full-circle experience."