This tea room was designed as an exhibition pavilion for a Japanese menswear brand to unveil its first women's collection during Paris Fashion Week in January 2026. We established two core principles for the project: that it should be a tea room created by men for women, and that its design should be suitable for transport to convey Japanese tea ceremony culture to the world.

 　The design of a tea room incorporates the concept of UTSUSHI (translation). This refers to the practice of citing the design and aesthetic sensibilities of an exemplary tea room, known as HONKA (original model), in order to pass on its excellence to future generations.
 　When examining historical and cultural tea rooms to select this original model, one is struck anew by how many are profoundly enclosed spaces. There are two primary reasons for this. Firstly, to clearly sever ties with the outside world, thereby encapsulating the tea master's idealised microcosm. Secondly, because status was equal within the tea room, and it served as a venue for political negotiations among samurai and officials. For instance, in the National Treasure tea rooms known as the Three Famous Tearooms, the core of their beauty lies not in incorporating external views, but in the masterful combination of planar materials such as tatami mats, earthen walls, and woven bamboo ceilings.
 　Against this backdrop, the tea ceremony flourished culturally within Japan's pre-modern male-dominated society. Consequently, most tea masters and creators of renowned tea rooms were men, making tea rooms like the Three Famous Seats distinctly masculine spaces.
 　Amidst this, there exists a rare tea room called Seiko-ken, built in Kanazawa by Maeda Nariyasu, lord of the Kaga domain, for his mother. This tea room features an earthen floor where the garden seems to flow into the interior. Rather than focusing on the treatment of flat materials within, the design concentrates on the connection to the outside, specifically the openings.
 　The circumstance of a male feudal lord creating a tea room for his female mother resonates with the aesthetic of a men's brand designing clothing for women. We therefore conceived this project as a design that reinterprets and transforms Seiko-ken creating a translation that embodies its essence.

 　Seiko-ken is a square plan measuring four and a half tatami mats. However, considering it is a tea room transportable anywhere in the world, it must serve both as a logistics module of the maximum overseas-shippable size (2,000mm x 3,000mm) and as the tatami module for the tea room itself. Considering that a single shipping crate must contain the wooden frame, tatami mats, tokonoma alcove, tokonoma pillar, and all other components constituting the tea room, we assumed a three-mat tea room would be the optimal size.
 　When transitioning the tea room from four-and-a-half mats to three mats in a contemporary manner, we aimed for a tea room without walls to avoid losing the connection with the external space. As Seiko-ken is not an independent building but a room within a residence, we first sketched an imaginary elevation treating Seiko-ken as a single structure. This helped us understand the relationship between the openings where the design converges and the surrounding space. Furthermore, we sought to harmonise the essence of the traditional space with new values, attempting to inherit the space using only two contemporary materials: Japanese oak and brass.

 　The details avoid the strong geometry found in traditional tea rooms, such as dividing lines, circles, or repeating patterns. Instead, we incorporated organic intersections of straight lines and forms with rounded edges, creating a tea room that balances tension and warmth. We were particularly thorough in incorporating contemporary values.
 　For instance, the central pillar of Seiko-ken uses bamboo. When substituting this bamboo with brass, in pre-modern times, I believe intricate metalwork would have been employed to express this bamboo. As industrialisation began and the dawn of modernism arrived, there was a tendency to explain phenomena through order, likely organising the bamboo's joints into a series of numerical ratios for production. Subsequently, in the modern era where industrialisation became mass production, extreme abstraction became fundamental, and the bamboo joints are divided into uniform segments. We interpreted contemporary as a value system that “breaks regularity to emphasise only the essence”. Consequently, we created brass sculptures with a joint arrangement that intensifies the spatial expansion effect inherent to bamboo.

 　The resulting form was then adapted to the logistics module. For a 2,000mm x 3,000mm flat shape, a height of 300mm proved the most economical size for transport. After designing the wooden crate structure to maximise internal capacity, each component was determined to fit entirely within it without waste.

 　Consequently, the walls of this tea room comprise six wooden frames. Joining these logistics-module frames with timber framing would make assembly difficult, while bolting them together would appear crude. Therefore, the brass corner posts fitted to the top and bottom of each corner are designed to connect the frames while also considering the effect of the posts pushing the space outwards. Furthermore, to enable anyone to easily install and dismantle it without special tools, all joints are designed like flat-pack furniture. Having carefully considered the optimal method for each connection point, dozens of different types of processing are concealed within the wooden frames.