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

An unusual lochside garden in the Highlands, filled with vibrant South African plants

10.27

Though set on a loch in the Highlands, this unusual garden contains an abundance of colourful plants from South Africa, all thriving under the watchful eye of its horticulturist…

Gardens

Read at House & Garden ↗

One letter a week, starting soon.

Latest

An unusual lochside garden in the Highlands, filled with vibrant South African plants

More from House & Garden on Uchi

The dos and don’ts of decorating rooms with slanted walls House & Garden

Our favourite British houses with royal connections House & Garden

Carlos Garcia's colourful take on a handsome Queen Anne house in Norfolk House & Garden

The most haunted country houses, castles and historic buildings in Britain House & Garden

12 beautiful flower-inspired buildings around the world – including a greenhouse in West Sussex House & Garden

How Giles Deacon turned his couturier’s eye to ceramics, with a hint of the supernatural House & Garden