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

Design Milk

Infiniti Carries Kyoto’s Bamboo Forests Into the Design of the 2027 QX80

10.21

The bamboo groves of Kyoto are built on repetition, with segmented stalks rising in close-set ranks as filtered light falls through the canopy overhead.

Natural materials Japan-inspired

Read at Design Milk ↗

One letter a week, starting soon.

Latest

Infiniti Carries Kyoto’s Bamboo Forests Into the Design of the 2027 QX80

Related

En coulisses des plus beaux hôtels du Japon, entre Tokyo, Kyoto et la baie d'Ago AD France

Carhartt WIP x Kinto's Kakomi Donabe Puts the Japanese Clay Pot to Work Hypebeast Design

A 1908 Japanese Prison Finds New Life as a Luxury Hotel Design Milk

Is Wood “Tile” Replacing Hardwood Floors? Here's What Designers Think About the Trend House Beautiful

Six generations in, this Japanese bolthole is shaping a new chapter in ryokan design Wallpaper*

Casa dos Pessegueiros es un diálogo entre la arquitectura modernista y la contemporánea AD Mexico