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

Elle Decor

Van Cleef & Arpels Announces Support for Montecito’s Lotusland

11.03

The jewelry house heads to Santa Barbara with a fitting gift from a brand captivated by botanic motifs.

Read at Elle Decor ↗

One letter a week, starting soon.

Latest

Van Cleef & Arpels Announces Support for Montecito’s Lotusland

More from Elle Decor on Uchi

7 Gilded Age Homes Where You Can Live Like the Astors Elle Decor

Next-Gen Mineral Surfaces for Your Kitchen, Bath, and More Elle Decor

ELLE Decoroscope: Your November Design Horoscope Is Here Elle Decor

Before & After: How an Artist and Architect Couple Turned the “Worst House” on the Block Into Their Dream Home Elle Decor

Discover the Modest St. Louis Home Where Chuck Berry Wrote His First Hits Elle Decor

Inside Banqueting House, the Last Surviving Piece of the Lost Palace of Whitehall Elle Decor