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Reservations

STORY

Story

Weaving time, brewing place.

Story

Iwase sits in the arm of Toyama Bay. From the Edo period into the Meiji era it was a port of call for the Kitamae-bune, the ships that carried goods along the Sea of Japan coast. The shipping agents’ houses still stand along the old Hokkoku road, and the wealth they brought put culture down into the ground here.

The building we work with is an ordinary concrete one, old enough to have a history in this town. In renovating it we have deliberately avoided legible “Japanese-style” decoration. Instead, Japanese sensibility enters a modern concrete space as metaphor. That is the shape this stay takes.

What sits underneath our company, WAPLUS, is a simple wish: to be close enough to someone’s happiness to share it. Turn a closed door into a window onto the region’s future. This is the first step.

Three words the stay is built on

STaY

  • S Simple life The plain, unhurried way of living here
  • Ta Tasting Taking it in fully, with all the senses
  • Y Yet to be told The part of Japan that has not been written up

“Japan” as a Metaphor

Not copying the forms, but translating the sensations. Eight devices from Japanese architecture, rebuilt inside a modern concrete shell.

  • ENGAWA

    A sense of threshold

    You take off your shoes and step up. In that one movement your gaze and your mood change register — Japan’s own culture of the boundary.

  • KOSHIBARI

    The centre of gravity

    Washi paper applied to waist height. It protects the wall, and it lowers the centre of the room, which settles you.

  • ANDON

    Light that settles

    Low, calm light at foot level, like a paper lantern.

  • SHOJI

    Light and view, filtered

    Direct sun is softened, brightness kept, and the view outside is cut into a clean silhouette.

  • FUSUMA E

    Art as part of the room

    Not a painting in a frame to be studied, but art that is part of the space itself.

  • TSUKIMIDAI

    A view within a view

    A platform that projects out, so you watch the landscape from inside the landscape.

  • MAJIKIRI

    Switching the space

    Slide a screen and the room changes size, and changes job.

  • CHASHITSU

    Intimacy and focus

    Through the low entrance, a small and close space.