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Some design movements fade. Others refuse to leave. Mid-century modern interior design has held its ground for over seven decades, showing up…
Mediterranean patios tend to fail in the same way. Someone buys terracotta pots, lays gravel, plants lavender and rosemary, and a wet…
Chanoyu has its own room, the chashitsu. It has a tatami floor, an alcove called the tokonoma, a hearth, and a door…
A marble slab with dramatic veining. Handcrafted furniture built to your exact specifications. Silk drapery that catches afternoon light perfectly. These moments…
Tatami room is what most English speakers call a washitsu. The Japanese-style room has wall-to-wall tatami flooring and sliding doors, so the…
Stop guessing how many lights you need. This LED Light Requirement Calculator tells you exactly. What It Does Input your room dimensions. Get…
Raw wood grain. Stone fireplaces. That unmistakable feeling of walking into a space that actually breathes. Rustic interior design transforms homes into…
Futon means one thing in Japan and something fairly different in the West. The Japanese version is a bedding set of a…
A good ikebana piece can look almost bare to anyone used to florist bouquets. That’s on purpose. The result is an asymmetrical…
Walk into a room where everything feels just right, then into one where a sofa swallows the space. That difference? Scale and…
Wabi-sabi treats asymmetry, rough texture and visible age as qualities, not flaws. The Japanese aesthetic and philosophy finds beauty in things that…
Japanese lighting is low, warm and diffused. The light comes through paper, wood or bamboo, and it almost never comes from the…
A six-mat room sounds like a fixed size, and it isn’t. Japanese floor plans count rooms in tatami mats, and the mats…
The tatami room that defined the older Japanese home is disappearing in Japan itself. Production of igusa tatami coverings fell from 26.9…
Tokyo Waterworks measured baths at 39% of per-person household water use in fiscal 2016, the largest share of any purpose. The utility…
Most traditional Japanese houses have almost no fixed interior walls. Sliding partitions do the dividing, so a single room can change size…
The tree itself is ordinary. A juniper, a Chinese elm or a ficus gets pruned, wired and held in a shallow container…
Scandinavian interior design is an interior design style from Denmark, Sweden and Norway that combines minimalism, natural materials, light colors and functional…
According to the Statistics Bureau of Japan’s 2013 Housing and Land Survey, the average dwelling in Japan measures 94.42 square meters. That…
Japanese rooms are built mostly from things that once grew. Hinoki, sugi, igusa rush, washi, bamboo, clay and lime plaster, and stone…
A sliding door moves sideways along a track instead of swinging on hinges, so it needs no floor arc and no swing…
A thin wooden lattice covered in translucent washi paper, set in a frame that either slides or stays fixed. That is a…
Modern interior design is an interior design style that applies early 20th century modernist principles, such as function before ornament and honest…
Let’s talk about that moment when you realize your new kitchen, or any big interior remodel, is not just a design project,…
A Japanese room is sized by counting its floor mats, so a space is described as six mats or eight. The mats…
Accent lighting is a directional lighting layer that draws the eye to one object, surface, or architectural feature by lighting it more…
Most visitors to a Japanese pagoda never get inside, and the ones who do usually find a single dim room at ground…
Kitchen cabinet refinishing doesn’t have to involve messy chemical strippers or hours of tedious sanding. Learning how to restain kitchen cabinets without…
A focal point in interior design is a visual element that draws the eye first and anchors the layout around it. It…
Zen interior design is an interior design style rooted in Japanese Zen Buddhist aesthetics that builds calm through restraint, natural materials and…