A Zen bedroom is mostly a room that asks very little of you at night. The furniture sits low and…
Everything in a traditional Japanese room starts from the tatami mat. Meals and sleep happen on the same floor, just…
Most Japanese kitchens look the way they do because of what has been left out. Counters hold very little and…
Japanese room decor works by subtraction. Furniture sits low, surfaces stay mostly bare, and a few materials (tatami, shoji paper,…
The zen look in a Japanese interior comes from the tea room, not from the Japanese house in general. Literature…
Most indoor Japanese gardens borrow from one source, the tsuboniwa, the small courtyard garden at the core of Kyoto’s machiya…
Japanese rooms are measured in tatami mats rather than square meters, and that one habit explains a lot about how…
Finn Juhl drew his Japan chair in 1953, and the Japan Series furniture line went into production with France &…
Most people picture a Japanese castle as one big building, but the inside splits in two. The keep (tenshu) was…
Walk into a Japanese-style room and the opaque sliding panels along its walls are fusuma. They split one room from…
Under the tabletop of a kotatsu sits a small heater, and a futon hangs over the table edge to keep…
Japanese tansu were made to be carried or wheeled out of a building, which explains the flexible wood joints and…
Walk into a Japanese-style reception room and look at the wall farthest from the entrance. There’s a recess there, a…
Most people who want a tea room at home already have a spare bedroom in mind, the one that currently…
Zen gardens are dry landscape gardens, called karesansui in Japanese, built from rock and gravel or sand with no real…
Most photos of Japanese gardens come from temples that have had centuries of work put into them. A backyard can…
Daylight comes through a shoji and the view stays out. That is the whole point of this Japanese sliding screen,…
The engawa is the wooden strip along the garden side of a Japanese-style house, sitting between the tatami rooms and…
Sitting on a tatami floor is comfortable until it isn’t, usually somewhere in the middle of a long meal. The…
Sitting on a bare floor punishes the knees and ankles first, and the hips not long after. Japan has a…
Japan’s traditional fabric dividers, noren, hang from a rod in a doorway, a window, along a wall or between rooms.…
Chanoyu has its own room, the chashitsu. It has a tatami floor, an alcove called the tokonoma, a hearth, and…
Tatami room is what most English speakers call a washitsu. The Japanese-style room has wall-to-wall tatami flooring and sliding doors,…
Futon means one thing in Japan and something fairly different in the West. The Japanese version is a bedding set…
A good ikebana piece can look almost bare to anyone used to florist bouquets. That’s on purpose. The result is…
Wabi-sabi treats asymmetry, rough texture and visible age as qualities, not flaws. The Japanese aesthetic and philosophy finds beauty in…
Japanese lighting is low, warm and diffused. The light comes through paper, wood or bamboo, and it almost never comes…
A six-mat room sounds like a fixed size, and it isn’t. Japanese floor plans count rooms in tatami mats, and…
The tatami room that defined the older Japanese home is disappearing in Japan itself. Production of igusa tatami coverings fell…
Tokyo Waterworks measured baths at 39% of per-person household water use in fiscal 2016, the largest share of any purpose.…