By Design takes a closer look at the world of design, in moments big and small.
IN 1919, THE Czech American architect Antonin Raymond and his wife and creative partner, the French-born American artist Noémi Raymond, traveled to Tokyo to help Frank Lloyd Wright construct the Imperial Hotel. While working on the project, they decided to set up their practice in Japan, where they remained — apart from a stint in the United States during and after World War II — until 1970. One of Antonin’s protégés, Junzo Yoshimura, who is said to have developed an interest in architecture after his father took him to the Imperial Hotel as a teenager, would later popularize Japanese Modernism in the United States, creating a house for the garden at New York’s Museum of Modern Art and two buildings for the future vice president Nelson Rockefeller’s family estate in Pocantico Hills, N.Y. But Yoshimura achieved most of his success in Japan; by the time of his death in 1997, at age 88, he was responsible for the schematic design for a wing of Emperor Hirohito’s palace in Tokyo as well as several dozen private houses across the country, including a three-bedroom weekend home in the cliffside town of Atami on the Pacific, where, at the request of the beauty mogul Hatsuko Endo, he carpeted each space in a different color.
Five years ago, Naoki Kotaka, 39, a writer and curator with a background in architecture, and his high school friend Aimi Sahara, 39, the founder and designer of the women’s denim brand Tu Es Mon Tresor, became art advisers for a wealthy Japanese private equity investor in his 50s. On behalf of their client, who lives in Tokyo and asked not to be named, they acquired paintings by such artists as Jean-Michel Basquiat and David Hockney, and a fragment of “We the People” (2011-16), the Danish Vietnamese artist Danh Vo’s 250-piece copper replica of the Statue of Liberty. They soon realized that they would have to find somewhere to put this growing collection. The investor had recently purchased a mountain lodge by Yoshimura in Nagano prefecture that is still being renovated. Then the property in Atami, about 60 miles southwest of Tokyo, came on the market. At first, their client was reluctant: The house, which was built in 1977, was smaller than he wanted. But Kotaka and Sahara saw an opportunity. By furnishing the space with rare midcentury pieces, most of which they would buy at auction or source from galleries in Milan, São Paulo, Paris and New York, they could place Yoshimura in a new context — as an influential Japanese architect, but also as part of an international network of Modernists, including the Raymonds and Wright, as well as Le Corbusier, Charlotte Perriand and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.
Before signing the deal, Endo’s son, whose family often visited the house, made Kotaka and Sahara promise that their client wouldn’t tear the place down. Despite not being designers themselves, Kotaka and Sahara ended up returning the 3,240-square-foot, two-story structure to its early glory with, Kotaka says, “repainting and some partial carpentry fixes.” After consulting with a few historians, architects and craftspeople, they also retiled the upstairs bathroom, recarpeted the floors using Yoshimura’s preferred mill and added contemporary art by the painter Alex Katz and others to make the house, which now functions as an event and exhibition space — and, to a lesser extent, a weekend retreat, for the duo sometimes as much as for their client — feel new again.
“YOSHIMURA CARED ABOUT people and how they’d enjoy their life here,” says Kotaka on a hot afternoon this past September. While he sets the dining table, Sahara emerges from the open kitchen with grilled freshwater eel and rice for lunch. As with a lot of the house’s décor, Yoshimura designed the nine-foot-long wood table and the hooded cotton light above it specially for the space. Here and in the adjacent living area, pale green wool carpeting and earthy furniture — a jacaranda coffee table and yellow armchair and sofa set by the mid-20th-century, Portuguese-born Brazilian designer Joaquim Tenreiro; a wrought-iron guéridon by the French minimalist Jean-Michel Frank; and a bamboo-and-enameled brass lamp by the Swiss architect Pierre Jeanneret — suggest a kind of anachronistic lounge life. As soon as they arrived, Kotaka and Sahara took down the fabric wall treatments and removed the 1980s leather furniture that made the sun-dappled rooms feel dark. “It was more like a bar where you’d drink whiskey and smoke cigars,” he says. “We wanted it to be a bit brighter.”
Elsewhere, they mostly left the existing colors alone. From the foyer, where they hung a 1968 red enameled steel wall cabinet by Perriand to match the carpet, a corridor leads to a blue study and a main bedroom in calming mustard green, or “sand,” as Kotaka calls it, with a bed and dresser by Yoshimura and a pair of upholstered gray Isamu Kenmochi chairs from the 1970s. “We didn’t want to add too many things that would evoke the reality of a lived space,” says Kotaka. “It’s more blank.” Next to the primary bathroom — whose floors are also carpeted — is a black-tiled room containing Endo’s original hooded hair dryer. “Her Hitchcock salon,” says Kotaka, pointing at the now purely decorative device. If you tried to use it, he adds, “you’d probably rip off your head.” Upstairs, past a blue-tiled bathroom and a guest room with a tweed Tenreiro armchair overlooking the sea, what was once the children’s bedroom has become a skylit den with red carpeting, a built-in sofa and two wooden stools by Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret. When guests come over, they either hang out here or outside by the barbecue pit.
But the clearest intervention is in the kitchen. The old cork tiles on the floor were replaced by ceramic ones with a Pac-Maze-like motif by the American artist Andrea Zittel, who made them for her own home in California’s Mojave Desert, and the former maid’s room is now part of the pantry. “Andrea’s installation became a really good tool for us to unify these spaces,” says Kotaka. Except for a bouquet of sunflowers and eucalyptus arranged in an oxblood vase on the counter, the most striking object in the kitchen is a grubby black apron hanging from the oven door that reads, “Maybe broccoli doesn’t like you either.” In a house this well considered, it stands out. By way of explanation, Sahara pulls out two more aprons and a marble rolling pin, which they got at the 2022 auction of Joan Didion’s estate. “My favorite writer,” she says with a smile. What started out as a place to store art has become a house in which to live with it. “It’s sort of like walking into a closet and trying on someone else’s original Margiela,” says Kotaka. “We’re engaging with pieces you’re not normally allowed to engage with.”
Photo assistant: Hiroki Nagahiro
