Yellowtrace

10 stories

YellowtraceExperimental Roma by Rodolphe Parente Brings Marble, Steel and 1970s Vibes to a Former Bank. A bank is a strange place to go looking for hedonism. Banks are built to reassure: sober, solid, permanent.

10.14

YellowtraceA Window Built for Orchids: The Swiss Watchmaker Behind Vitrocsa. Sunrise House by MCK. Photography: Michael Nicholson. Clifton House by Anthony Gill Architects. Photography: Rory Gardiner. Lavender Bay House by Tobias Partners. Photography: Justin Alexander.

10.12

YellowtraceCasper Mueller Kneer Design a Perfume Fountain at the Heart of Caron’s New Paris Store. Runway sets are the most short-lived architecture there is. A few minutes of drama, then the trucks arrive.

10.11

YellowtraceNo Botox: Raúl Sánchez Lets a Mataró Heritage Home Wear Its Age at La Casa del Pirata. Few houses come with a backstory like this one. In 1820, eighteen-year-old Antoni Cuyàs left Mataró for Argentina with little more than rough navigation skills, and not many years later he’d become…

10.07

YellowtraceLilac by Bureau: 44 Square Metres, One Counter and Two Domestic Worlds. How many square metres does a home actually need? Bureau has been poking at that question for a while.

10.05

YellowtraceSampling the 80s: The Ken Club in Paris by Rodolphe Parente and Marion Mailaender. When Mireille and Pierre Benzaquen opened the Ken Club in 1985, Paris had seen nothing quite like it.

10.04

YellowtraceMadeleine Castaing Meets Manhattan: Inside Child Studio’s New York Debut. Before Alexy Kos and Che Huang touched a single length of velvet, they were thinking about Madeleine Castaing’s midnight blue and leopard print, and Renzo Mongiardino’s tented 1960s salons.

10.01

YellowtraceFarrell Wray Architects Build a Concrete Gallery Around a Tree They Refused to Touch. Most architects get a brief. Farrell Wray Architects got a brief and a non-negotiable stakeholder: an existing gum tree standing between two buildings at Marcellin College in Bulleen, Victoria.

09.30

YellowtraceEllison Studios Gives The Least Public Room In The House Its Best Furniture Yet. The bedroom is usually the last room in the house to get the good furniture. It is also the least public, which is why it tends to absorb the hand-me-downs, the frame that came with the apartment…

09.28

YellowtraceCiguë Designs Satisfy’s First Store as Two Mirroring Spaces in Paris. Paris ‘ Marais district has a new pair of shopfronts facing off across Rue de Saintonge, and they belong to Satisfy—the French running brand that spent eleven years building a culture before it built…

09.27

発見, hakken: a finding. This is a record of what one designer notices in a week.

I grew up beside the Arakawa, in Adachi, and spent five years in a Ginza studio drawing identities for companies you have used without once thinking about them. That work teaches you to read a city as a page. A vending machine is set type. A rice bag is a packaging problem somebody solved in the eighties and nobody has improved on since. A good deal of the best design in Japan is like that: already in the street, unsigned, waiting to be looked at properly.

So this magazine watches the street as well as the feed. Around fifty sources come in through the day, ten of them Japanese, and what the world's studios are arguing about is counted and plotted so you can watch it move. Every third day I write about one thing I actually stood in front of.

What you get for a story is a headline, a short excerpt, one picture and the way out to the people who reported it. Never the article itself, and never the photograph as though it were ours. A story written in Japanese stays in Japanese here, headline and excerpt both, because that is how its author set it down.

Everything is also published in Japanese at hakkenmag.com/ja/.

— Ren Arakawa, Tokyo