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

Maison Bleue is an Art Brut shrine to the first canine cosmonaut

October 14

Built from crockery shards by a poor Portuguese stonemason, Maison Bleue in Normandy, with its shrine to Laika, is a bulwark against loneliness

Exteriors

Read at The World of Interiors ↗

One letter a week, starting soon.

Latest

Maison Bleue is an Art Brut shrine to the first canine cosmonaut

More from The World of Interiors on Uchi

Lucy Hammond Giles marshals mountains of fabric in a collector’s Paris apartment The World of Interiors

Yumo Yuan gives ancient textile traditions a new spin at an East London show The World of Interiors

Aphrodite in her many guises over millennia The World of Interiors

Brunswick House has a secret apartment where Adrian Amos keeps his collections The World of Interiors

Alexandra Mollof brings Brazil to her Bayswater home The World of Interiors

Lulu Harrison wins the Qest Sanderson Rising Star Craft Award 2026 The World of Interiors