About

The creation of a unique space that blends into the home is one of the primary visions I value when I design a bathroom. Each place has a variety of distinctive backgrounds that incorporates local history, culture, geography, and climate. If the underlying conditions of each place can be integrated into the bathroom, it should be naturally result in unique characteristics while tuning into the surrounding environment. It becomes the most precious time when we survey the environment and we feel an ambience particularly unique to the area, such as its culture, customs, history, and landscape which are created by the inhabitants. This constitutes the base for designing work.

In addition, when I design, I think of the bathwater as a medium that connects the person to the space. Taking a bath means stepping into the spatial element that is bathwater as a medium. In other words, we connect and physically assimilate into the space through the bathwater. We also feel a spiritual unity with something at the same time. The sensation starts from a refreshing feeling that leads to a sense of relief, euphoria, purification, and paradise. In a deeper sense, memories of our mothers body and, ultimately, a sensation leading to the universe or one’s soul might arise. This is another ideal vision I have for a bathing space.The glittering bathwater, the undulating water surface and the warm embrace of the bathwater serves not only as spatial material but also as a spatial medium that brings rich expression to the space and allows us to relax. Perhaps the sense of unity or connection to something is one of the most comfortable and therapeutic of feelings.

Another primary vision I value when designing a bathroom is to create a space that combines a sense of nostalgia with newness. Traditionally, Japanese people enjoy a variety of forms and styles of bath, such as steam baths, hot springs, public bathhouses, super sento, home baths, spas, and saunas. In other words, bathing is a part of the traditional culture essential to Japanese. I believe tradition should be passed down from generation to generation while integrating conservational elements with evolution. As a representative space, it is reasonable to create a bathing space design that offers a sense of nostalgia and newness at the same time. Newness and nostalgia are defined as simplicity, which may lead to the idea for the space.