Lofty

This is an amazing seaside "atelier" built by a talented artist / ceramicist (is this a word?) friend of the Yoshidas... His pottery studio is hidden down in the basement, but the house is built on a hill, so the entire back of the house is a wall of windows!

Ikeda-san has the most non-traditional Japanese home I've seen. It's big and airy, with colorful glass marbles embedded into the concrete floor, bright white and turquoise walls, handbuilt furniture, and windows, windows, windows! Instead of solid walls, he separated spaces with walls of French doors and transoms, so the light pours in all the way to the front of the house. His painting studio, is in a double height space, punctuated with huge sculptural branches, dangling with small stones, sea glass, and shells.

The Yoshidas, Simon, and I hung out talking with him and Baku (the son of one of his good friends) for hours on Sunday. Baku is an architect from Osaka, young and hip, and bears a striking resemblance to one of my fellow architect friends, Jeff Hong in NYC. He's moving to Brussels in a few months to work in an architecture office (how rad is ithis?!?) and we're having a weekly English/Japanese exchange at a local izakaya or bar or something so that he can brush up on his English bfore tackling French and/or Flemish. It was the first time in Japan I have heard someone mention MVRDV, Hadid, and other architects!