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

The Spaces

Jacques Couëlle’s sculptural villa above Cannes is for sale

10.29

French architect Jacques Couëlle designed this hillside villa in 1961, originally drafting it for the Aga Khan. It sits within the Castellaras estate, between…

Read at The Spaces ↗

One letter a week, starting soon.

Latest

Jacques Couëlle’s sculptural villa above Cannes is for sale

More from The Spaces on Uchi

A sprawling home near Zion National Park asks $12 million The Spaces

Two artists transformed this German house into a work of art The Spaces

Is there anything prefab architecture can't do? The Spaces

John Yeon’s long, lean Swan House is up for sale in Portland The Spaces

Soft power: the contemporary allure of fibre art The Spaces

The Swiss Alps are calling from this converted 17th-century barn The Spaces