A room is a decision about how you want to be tired at the end of the day.

I live in forty-eight square metres in Tokyo with one good chair and far too many bowls, so I have had to mean that. I trained as an architect and left to write, which my teachers took badly. Uchi (内) means inside, and it means home: the room you come back to. The palette comes after the tiredness. So does the name on the lamp.

This is where I keep what the world's rooms are doing. Around seventy sources, read in Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Vietnamese, Italian, French and English: an apartment in Seoul, a house outside Taipei, a Copenhagen showroom seen from here rather than from Denmark. East first, because east is where I am sitting.

Each story is a headline, an excerpt of a few lines, one photograph and a link to whoever did the work. We never reprint the piece, and the photograph belongs to the person who took it. When a room was written up in Korean or Italian it stays in Korean or Italian here; the link takes you to the writer's own words.

I am not trying to be complete. I am trying to notice.

— Mio Tachibana, Tokyo

← Uchi Archive

House & Garden

65 home office ideas sure to inspire productivity

September 15

Given that working from home is so much a part of our lives now, we might as well expend some effort in making our home offices as pleasing as possible

Decoration

Read at House & Garden ↗

One letter a week, in your inbox.

Latest

65 home office ideas sure to inspire productivity

More from House & Garden on Uchi

Harrison Ford at home: 10 photos of the Hollywood heartthrob’s life off set House & Garden

A 1960s house in East Sussex that showcases the artist owner's bespoke furniture designs House & Garden

A restored early 20th-century house outside Ghent, full of tactile touches and earthy sophistication House & Garden

Ben Pentreath turns his hand to an Arts and Crafts house in north London House & Garden

Where is The Great British Bake Off filmed? Inside the grand country estate House & Garden