Yellowtrace

10 stories

YellowtraceTrattoria Breda by Allen Kaufmann Architekten Flirts With Ugly and Lands Firmly on Cool. Can we talk about orange for a minute? It might just be the most difficult colour of all time. Too loud, too seventies, too close to a fast-food menu board.

10.28

YellowtraceDieter Vander Velpen Architects Build a Material Playground Inside a Former Antwerp Confectionery. Every studio that fits out its own office is making an argument. The client is the practice, the brief is “show them who we are”, and there is nobody on the other side of the brief to say no.

10.26

YellowtraceThe Gentleman by YSG Studio: A 1929 Potts Point Apartment Built for Two Very Tall People. The first thing that got me in this home was the dining table. It’s a 1929 Art Deco apartment in Potts Point that YSG Studio reworked for a couple both over two metres tall, and before the delicious…

10.25

YellowtraceBetyle Mixes a Century of Design in Marseille Without Freezing Any of It in Time. Nostalgia in interiors usually goes one of two ways. Either a home gets frozen in a single decade, every surface dutifully matched to the same year, or the past is treated as a mood board to be…

10.21

YellowtraceJardan’s Etta Treats the Sofa and Coffee Table as One Idea. Last month, Jardan took its design thinking outdoors with Shoreline , a collection built to stand up to Australian sun, salt and sudden downpours.

10.19

YellowtraceBusiness on the Outside, Party on the Inside: The Fun House in Kamnik, Slovenia by Alto Design Studio. From the street, the Fun House gives absolutely nothing away. It’s a newly built, three-storey family home with a gable roof, sitting politely among neighbours of similar size and materials on the…

10.18

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

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