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Architects: Takato Tamagami
- Area: 130 m²
- Year: 2013
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Photographs:Masaya Yoshimura
Text description provided by the architects. BIRDHOUSE is a pop-up department store featuring a range of products including art, craft, fashion, potted plants and garden planning ideas to enhance the home and workplace. The name of the store, Birdhouse, is derived from our client’s idea that curious and creative people are like birds who fly all over the world to find something interesting, and this shop is the place where they bring back their findings.
We then used our client’s concept to create a loft that is used as an artist’s atelier. The low slanted ceiling with dim light from a window illuminates the dark space. Vibrant noises from the street invite the artist to take a look out the window... Our intention was to create a place that will arouse people’s curiosity for something unknown or unseen.
The space is simply composed of slanted walls that are inserted into the bare structure and that continue the metaphor of the roof. The inner space, surrounded by these walls, is the main selling area called the ‘Courtyard’. We wanted to evoke a town square surrounded by old houses, so we finished the slanted walls with rough veneer and cement board to express a rough and faded wall finish that has aged over time. The outer space behind the walls is named the ‘Loft’, and the openings or ‘bay windows’ in various sizes on the walls connect both spaces.
Customers enter from a narrow corridor-like space and have a view of the Courtyard from a high window, and then pass through the Loft to enter the Courtyard. The walls are cut out and folded, and these spaces are used as fitting rooms and selling areas. A long L-shaped checkout counter is inserted at the corner of the slanted walls, where customers and staff face each other from both sides of the walls. Customers wander around between the Loft and the Courtyard and enjoy searching for their favorite products all the while playing a kind of hide-and-seek from both sides of the walls and looking for others through cut-outs and folds.
A traveler discovers something new between the familiar and unfamiliar. People find great sensation between reality and fiction. Our intention is to provide this kind of contrasting duality and to give a fresh and stimulating experience to customers.
