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 Beautiful

Experts Are Raising Concerns About Quartz Countertops—but It's Not as Scary as It Sounds

10.26

Designers weigh in on the current state of countertop materials.

Kitchens & bathrooms

Read at House Beautiful ↗

One letter a week, starting soon.

Latest

Experts Are Raising Concerns About Quartz Countertops—but It's Not as Scary as It Sounds

Related

7 Things Designers Wish More People Knew Before Getting a Kitchen Island House Beautiful

Calling All Kitchen Icons House Beautiful

The Portaluppi Bathroom is the New “It” Loo Architectural Digest

A Contemporary Inglis Hall Kitchen Brings New Life to a 700-Year-Old Wiltshire Manor The Nordroom

This Coastal Home Uses Tiles In Colourful + Unexpected Ways The Design Files

Japan【キッチン実例&カタログ】シルバーと工芸が溶け合う、韓国のモダンな感性 Elle Decor Japan