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

Wallpaper*

How Aldo Bakker's ambiguous designs merge sculpture and function

10.29

The work of Dutch designer Aldo Bakker defies convention: eschewing the immediate, traditional functionality of design objects, his pieces are sculptural in scope and largely abstract.

Read at Wallpaper* ↗

One letter a week, starting soon.

Latest

How Aldo Bakker's ambiguous designs merge sculpture and function

More from Wallpaper* on Uchi

On a trip around Romania, Harley Weir photographs today’s witches Wallpaper*

Join the Zaha Hadid Foundation celebrations of the late architect's legacy on her birthday Wallpaper*

Look closely: This table actually tells a story about geopolitics Wallpaper*

NM3 brings its signature metalwork to an intimate Roman wine bar Wallpaper*

Discover Norwegian architect Wenche Selmer and her rural Nordic retreat Wallpaper*

A new memoir takes us behind the scenes of Robert Wilson’s creative universe Wallpaper*