Small Home: Tokyo Blue

You were very hands-on with the renovation of your apartment. Did you come to this with a lot of prior experience?

We actually had no experience at all with tearing down walls or tackling such a major renovation ourselves. I remember we watched a few YouTube channels every now and again to see how others approached it and also reached out to a few friends with experience for advice.

What was the experience like of living in your apartment while renovating it?

[Laughs]. We don't recommend it. It was a slow process that we did ourselves for nearly two years. It was rewarding though, every time we broke through into another room or discovered something exciting, like the original pink tiles in the bathroom or a bit of floral wallpaper from the 70s.

There seems to be more and more concrete appearing in contemporary Japanese apartments. Is this more about aesthetics and practicality, do you think? Your concrete ceilings are a direct result of your practical decision to remove the ceiling boards to achieve more ceiling height for instance…

For us, I feel it was more the aesthetics of it with a bit of luck that we could gain some extra height and floor space. Over the years, we've seen more and more spaces being built or reformed around Tokyo with a distinct industrial look. It's definitely direct and honest, but also durable and no-fuss. Peeling away layer upon layer of ceiling board and wallpaper that had been added over the decades we discovered a rough broken concrete that just appealed to both of us.

You clearly value the charm of these imperfections and what they bring to your space…

The walls are broken and fractured and there were many flaws that we wanted to keep exposed. The bathroom floor is made of wood and our carpenter carefully cut it to shape around the parts of the broken wall so that the floorboard could fit just perfectly. Our custom joinery storage pod was made to fit like a jigsaw puzzle – at one corner, it wraps around an irregularly shaped concrete ceiling beam. The contrast between the texture of the broken concrete walls with the sleek stainless steel in the kitchen along with the shiny, blue floor really appeals to us, too.

In what ways have you embraced these little stories?

We stripped the apartment down to its bare essentials – it's given us everything it can. We now hear exactly when our neighbour upstairs takes a shower because the pipes are all exposed. The light switches on the walls have cables running out of them that create a kind of linear drawing along the walls.

You altered the floor plan of your apartment significantly by removing all the walls and transforming a three-bedroom apartment into a studio apartment. It's such a bold move. Did that feel risky or was it always clear that this was what you wanted to do?

What we wanted most in our small Tokyo apartment was a space that maximised natural light and felt open. The open-plan design was key to making the apartment feel much larger than it actually is. When we first viewed the apartment, the view of Mount Fuji was what sold us, but it was only visible from one room. We wanted to find a way to bring that stunning view into other areas of the apartment as well. We can be in different areas of our home but it still feels intimate, like a shared experience. Living in a small space, we don't often have guests staying over, which makes it easier to live without walls between the bedroom and living room. We both enjoy each other's company, so having an open layout allows us to move around freely while still being able to see and talk to each other.

The flexibility of the space is something we really value too. It's easy to move the furniture around and create entirely new, functional areas – like if we didn’t want the studio workspace opposite the bedroom, we could simply switch it to where the living room is now. We love that adaptability and flexibility a lot. It keeps things exciting.

We also think our daughter Sophie, a four-year-old British Shorthair, really appreciates having a space with no boundaries to run around and play.

Can you tell us about your lovely sleek kitchen units – where they're from and how you customised them?

We have a custom-built stainless steel METOD kitchen system from IKEA. Their kitchen planning team assisted us with several specific requests, including raising the height of the unit to better suit our needs, as kitchens in Japan tend to have lower counters. The standard height is around 85cm, but we had it raised to 95cm by mounting the unit on taller legs. Additionally, we opted for a gas cooktop and extraction fan, which we sourced from a different company. We have a great stainless steel shelving unit we found at HAY which hangs perfectly in a space next to the kitchen unit for the plates and cups we use every day.

You've employed some really clever zoning techniques in your renovation to elegantly divide the space. Can you share some examples?

Once the apartment walls were removed, we divided the space in half using a thin 5mm brass strip with blue tiles on one side and mortar on the other. We thought about having the entire floor covered in blue but Koichi also loved the look of a concrete floor, so we made a compromise to divide it – which visually reminds us of Koichi's love of more neutral, minimal design, and my love of colour and growing up with brighter interiors in South Africa. The use of concrete is again used in the genkan – the entrance way in all Japanese homes where you enter and take off your shoes. This section is the same level of the corridor outside and a step lower than the rest of the apartment. It demarcates the space between outside and inside clearly.

Where did the ideas for these interventions come from and how do they impact your enjoyment of your home?

Before we started living together, we both had different approaches to interior design. Koichi always surrounded himself with muted, natural tones – greys, browns, and loads of plants everywhere. I've always dreamed of that aesthetic but somehow gravitate towards bright colours. Also clinical institutional design really appeals to me. We joke that the apartment is a reflection of how we met halfway with literally one side being a bright blue and the other a calmer, more typical Japanese approach. Our mutual love for the colour pink shows in our bathroom which is enveloped in a cute colour called Eraser Pink we found at Benjamin Moore.

You've also done some really clever things with lighting that increases flexibility, functionality and allows you to easily adapt the mood of your spaces. Can you tell us about the lighting in your home and how it makes the design work that bit harder?

I don't think either of us wanted lighting that would light up an entire space all at once. As the sun sets, we ease into the evening with pockets of light we can control around the apartment. Without any internal walls, we carefully selected lighting that allowed specific areas to be lit up in a certain way. We have lighting attached to the perimeter walls (that can rotate), portable lighting, and then we have the flexibility to move lights along the multiple sliding rails, too. There's a lot of downlighting throughout the home which results in gentle pools of light. This definitely helps to create a sense of more space and ambiance.

Your home is filled with such a unique mix of furniture, artwork and decorative objects. I feel like if I attempted to mix vintage pieces with lots of HAY and African art in an industrial style apartment it would go very wrong indeed. How did you work this magic?

[Laughs]. If it makes you happy, just do it! I think we've always been pretty honest about what we both like and don't like. When it comes to furniture, we spend way too much time searching for a piece that feels right for us and then choose something we like together. I've always loved the clinicalness of steel mixed with shades of blue and white. The contrast between soft and hard furnishings. Between natural materials and steel and concrete. The African art or fabrics we have – we really appreciate – there's a memory attached to a lot of the objects in our home. This mixture of styles... maybe the indoor plants tie it all together? Actually, I think the plants do bridge a gap between the industrial and modern and vintage.

You mentioned a shared studio space. Do both you and Koichi work from home? Is this full time?

Koichi works from home full-time as a freelance designer. I will work from home over weekends editing photographs and working on our small online shop.

We did spot your sewing machine… Is this related to the online shop? Tell us more…

Koichi is super amazing using a sewing machine, and I'm a mess. We started a small side business called Thokozile a couple of years ago selling bow ties and bags we made (I chose the material and Koichi did all of the sewing) using South African fabric called isiShweshwe and later fabric from other parts of Africa. It was fun having pop-up shops around Tokyo in department stores like Isetan and for a while we supplied a store in Omotesando. Now, we sell everything online and it's a mixture of things that we design and sew from home, with some African craftwork we bring back from our trips there.

Do you have a sort of routine (or dance?!) to make the space function well from a working and living point of view or does the design take care of that?

The space has become so versatile that the design mostly takes care of that.

What happens if you or Koicho get cross with one another? You can't slam a curtain!

You're right, we can't slam a curtain and the only door in the house is in the bathroom and that's made of steel which is far too heavy to slam! We actually never get angry with each other in front of our daughter Sophie.

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You can find David and Koichi's shop at thokozile.theshop.jp