A Room Is a Decision
Last week I moved a lamp. Thirty centimetres to the left, off the desk and onto the floor, and the whole apartment changed its mind about the evening. That is what interiors are: not a purchase, a decision. Where the light falls. What the hand touches first in the morning. Which colour the wall is allowed to be.
Uchi is here to watch those decisions being made across Asia: Tokyo, Seoul, Shanghai, Taipei, Hanoi, Bangkok. Every three hours we read the region's interiors press and put it on a radar: which materials are rising, which rooms the studios are obsessed with this month, which colour is quietly winning.
The name is the idea. Uchi is inside, and uchi is home: my home, our home. Hakken, our first magazine, looks outward at design. Uchi looks in.
The lamp is still on the floor. At this hour it puts the ceiling in soft grey and leaves the corner by the door properly dark, which is where I wanted the dark to be. I have not moved it back, and I do not think I will.
Mio Tachibana was born in Kyoto, trained as an architect and left the drawing board to write about the rooms people actually live in. She keeps a 48-square-metre flat in Tokyo with one good chair and too many bowls, and believes a room is a decision about how you want to be tired at the end of the day.