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Architects: Makoto Yamaguchi Design
- Area: 20 m²
- Year: 2010
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Photographs:Koichi Torimura
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Lighting Design: Luxie, Mayumi Kondo
The single unit of an apartment building, built 40 years ago, was renovated as gallery and shop. The gallery shop sells jewelry, objects d'art, hat and photographs. The facade of the building is covered with ivy, giving the attractive feeling of the passage of time. You do not actually notice the presence of a commercial space. The customers who come here are the people who already know the shop, and it just has a small sign placed outside on the stairs. The specific style may be particular for this area.
The design concept is extremely simple: white painted wall, scaffold wood planking floor and display counters are all there is. The center counter helps customer circulation, and makes a stay longer in this limited size space (20m2). You can reach all items as you walk around. The place could feel constrained, but in fact, you don't feel like that, but comfortable, because of the small scale create intimate feeling.
All four sides of the center counter unit are covered with a mirrored surface, which reflects the floor planking, making the counter appear to be made of the same material. This also gives the illusion that the size of the room is much larger than it actually is. I removed the ceiling panels completely, leaving the underside of the apartment roofing in effect as the shop ceiling. This had the benefit of giving the room an extra 1.2m in height. By manipulating the horizontal and vertical dimensions, I achieved in giving the room the feeling of larger space.
The shop itself sells a wide range of items from antique goods to contemporary ones, so I made the design concept as it reflect this, you can look the 'new' white wall, the 'old' wooden ceiling and the passage of time in the scaffold wood planking floor.
