- 2024-2025
- Tokyo
- Takanawa
Within NEWoMan Takanawa, we designed a showroom for KIT, a furniture brand based on a simple yet beautifully engineered modular system that allows assembly by fastening pipes together.
Every component of KIT—the tabletops, legs, seats, castors—shares a common joint system, allowing the furniture to be assembled and disassembled with ease, without tools or screws. The mechanical nature of the furniture carries a dry sensibility, reminiscent of dry construction in its clarity and crispness.
Click-click, clack-clack, clink-clink.
In contrast to this dryness, we decided to create a space that feels distinctly wet, a bit like an atmospheric inversion of the furniture’s inherent sound and tactility.
Using spray-applied finishes commonly found on the exterior walls of old apartment buildings, we treated not only the walls and ceilings, but also the building services, door frames, curtain rails, signage, and hooks, coating them all without distinction.
Slathered and smeared, the wet-process surface covers the entire room in a single viscous texture, with joints and gaps disappearing. The space can no longer be broken down into individual parts; it becomes uniform and equalised, allowing the KIT furniture to stand out crisply, yet lightly scattered within it.
The space includes several “furniture-like” elements that are not products themselves: the large central counter and the low display fixtures that set out the layout of the showroom. These architectural furnishings needed to be clearly differentiated from the products.
To do so, we sampled materials and details from the existing stainless-steel window sashes and sheet-metal covers, allowing them to blend into the broader architectural context of NEWoMan Takanawa.
Fine-tuning the subtle relationship between objects and place, furniture and architecture, we allowed the space to form its own narrative, acting as a counterpoint to the narrative carried by the products themselves.
Category : Retail
Architects : DOMINO ARCHITECTS
Graphic Design : Kenji Ito Design
Construction : JPDH
Counter Manufacturing : COPACK
Photographs : Gottingham
in-use
Photography : Kenji Kagawa
Styling : Kenji Ito Design
