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

Designboom

design museum gent reopens with new wing built from locally made waste bricks

October 1

Design Museum Gent opens its collection to new perspectives Design Museum Gent in Ghent, Belgium , reopens on October 3rd, 2026, following a four-year renovation and expansion led by Carmody Groarke…

Read at Designboom ↗

One letter a week, in your inbox.

Latest

design museum gent reopens with new wing built from locally made waste bricks

More from Designboom on Uchi

designboom radar: exhibitions to see around the world this october Designboom

stone-built meadows boutique hotel takes shape around gardens in rural UK Designboom

anrealage wraps dresses in up to 2,000 e-ink panels for color-changing ‘skin’ Designboom

royal enfield revolutionizes the electric motorcycle experience with flying flea c6 Designboom

BUREAU uses color and translucency to reshape 44 sqm lilac apartment in lisbon Designboom