Matsuri - 2025

Once again, our love for Californian Japonisme guided our hand.

Far from any tourist-style exoticism, American architects spent the entire twentieth century discovering—often from the immaculate garden paths of the Katsura Imperial Villa—that seventeenth-century Sukiya architecture had already offered answers to all their modern questions.

The world had changed. People wanted sunlight and fresh air. Floor plans opened, spaces became modular, furniture was built in, and light took on a near-spiritual importance.

Beneath a deliberately steep ceiling, the Californian Rolls of Matsuri now wind their way through the space.

Echoing California’s dramatic rooflines, a shōji-like grid hides a complex, shifting lighting system that recreates the softness of a setting sun.
Huge stainless-steel panels—symbols of modernity since the streamline era of the 1930s—rest on an American-cherry base recalling the gentle warmth of the Eameses’ early Herman Miller furniture.

The kaiten was conceived as a piece of true Japanese architecture. The cladding is made of flattened, bleached bamboo slats. The dark-oak battens and the long integrated light slice the room into broad horizontals, evoking Frank Lloyd Wright’s Prairie Houses, at a time when he himself was captivated by Japan.

© Photos : Ludovic Balay