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 World of Interiors

John Giorno’s 1968 telephone artworks prophesy our uncertain times

September 17

Do telephones divide as much as connect us? It’s one of the defining questions of our times – but John Giorno was asking it back in 1968.

Culture Exhibitions Artists Books & Literature

Read at The World of Interiors ↗

One letter a week, in your inbox.

Latest

John Giorno’s 1968 telephone artworks prophesy our uncertain times

More from The World of Interiors on Uchi

This year’s new fabrics emerge from sin and cinders The World of Interiors

The Serpentine Pavilion Party 2026 The World of Interiors

Lee Krasner and Jackson Pollock go ‘toe to toe’ in a new exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art The World of Interiors

The Cinema Museum in Lambeth fights to survive The World of Interiors

The Plain English founder’s buoyant boathouse restoration The World of Interiors

Inside Jerry Butler’s celestial Tangier spot The World of Interiors