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 & Garden

Lulu Guinness on follies, one-of-a-kind treasures and working with a like-minded collaborator

October 6

When the designer needs something extraordinary, she turns to her friend, the woodworker Rollo Dunford Wood

Decoration

Read at House & Garden ↗

One letter a week, in your inbox.

Latest

Lulu Guinness on follies, one-of-a-kind treasures and working with a like-minded collaborator

More from House & Garden on Uchi

Should you put a bath in your bedroom? House & Garden

The best 2026 Christmas markets in the UK for festive shopping, funfairs and food House & Garden

The best Ben Pentreath rooms from the House & Garden archives House & Garden

Three cosy cottages we're booking this month House & Garden

10 beautiful bird boxes to put up in your garden now House & Garden

A 17th-century house in Suffolk beautified not once, but twice by Retrouvius House & Garden