Rare is the book that so thoroughly upends your romanticized image of a place while still inspiring you to travel there. But such is the case with Japanese Interiors the latest selection for Just Booked, our series on exciting new coffee table books. This new book by Mihoko Iida, published by Phaidon, takes readers through a variety of Japanese houses and gives clear and fascinating insight into the historic forces that shaped Japanese design.
The book is broken up into three main parts. First are aspirational houses, the ones you’d see in high-end magazines where shoots often happen before humans even occupy them, giving credence to the idea that the Japanese live monk-like lives in spaces with few objects or comfort. The houses are feats–perched over cliffs or swallowing nature–and showcase how much of the creativity is channeled into the house as spectacle–stairways to heaven, screens of stone, polygon shapes.
The second category is functional, and here the reader is taken inside houses that combing work and living as well as multiple-generations. There is clutter! One house in Miyamoto looks more like the residence of a kooky academic couple in Portland. There are also ideas we might consider odd, like one house that is built around a bathhouse of poured terrazzo.
The final category, is historic, which is especially delightful to page through since for so long there was a stigma in Japan for historic houses–the preference has long been to tear something down and build new. But this chapter introduces readers to the works of Koji Fujii, who was fusing Western and Japanese styles a century ago, and a number of houses one can visit, including Tower House, Ogawa House, and the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed Yodoko Guest House.
