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

AD IndiaIndia

Dimore Surfaces

10.28

A surface company driven by design, innovation, and precision

AD Design Show

Read at AD India ↗

One letter a week, starting soon.

Latest

Dimore Surfaces

More from AD India on Uchi

IndiaThis rammed earth home in Goa is oriented around a serene open-to-sky courtyard AD India

IndiaBloon Toys AD India

IndiaInside an idyllic holiday home in Maharashtra’s Poladpur surrounded by fruit orchards AD India

India7 plants you should NEVER keep in your house! Vastu says they bring negative energy AD India

India7 useful plants our grandmothers had in their kitchen gardens that you could easily grow AD India

IndiaThe 37 most spectacular train stations across the globe—with one in India AD India