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271 articles
The Danish Meteorological Institute puts Denmark’s 2006-2015 reference value at 1,722.1 hours of bright sunshine a year, up from 1,495 hours in…
Daylight comes through a shoji and the view stays out. That is the whole point of this Japanese sliding screen, which is…
The engawa is the wooden strip along the garden side of a Japanese-style house, sitting between the tatami rooms and the outdoors.…
A Scandinavian bathroom is mostly pale wood, white or soft gray surfaces and as much daylight as the window allows, with a…
Sitting on a tatami floor is comfortable until it isn’t, usually somewhere in the middle of a long meal. The zaisu chair…
Sitting on a bare floor punishes the knees and ankles first, and the hips not long after. Japan has a few cushions…
Japan’s traditional fabric dividers, noren, hang from a rod in a doorway, a window, along a wall or between rooms. Vertical slits…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
A Japanese room is sized by counting its floor mats, so a space is described as six mats or eight. The mats…
Most visitors to a Japanese pagoda never get inside, and the ones who do usually find a single dim room at ground…
A rustic beam can be a heavy old barn timber or a lightweight foam shell, and from the floor you often can’t…
Terracotta tile is red clay fired at a low temperature, either unglazed or with a light glaze. The iron in the clay…
Whitewash, sea blue, terracotta, ochre, olive green and lemon yellow. Those six cover most of what people mean by a Mediterranean palette,…
Mediterranean homes keep interiors cool through hot, dry summers with thick stucco-finished walls, low-pitched clay tile roofs, arched openings and shaded courtyards.…
NKBA’s Kitchen Planning Guidelines call for a work aisle of at least 42 inches when one person cooks and 48 inches when…