The brief was a principal bedroom for a couple who had spent fifteen years in a Tokyo apartment with no room to spare. They wanted the opposite: floor they could see, air above the bed, nothing asking for attention at the end of a long day.
Aoi Kenchiku Studio answered with a platform. The bed sits on a shallow oak deck lifted clear of the floor on a recessed base, so the mattress appears to hover a few centimetres above a woven sisal rug. Nothing touches the wall. A continuous band of oak runs the full width of the room behind the bed, thickening on either side into cantilevered nightstands that carry a single black task light each. Every other surface is plaster, tinted a warm off-white that reads almost pink at midday.
Light does most of the work. A cove above the headboard washes the plaster from below, and a second angled reveal in the ceiling drops daylight from the window wall into the centre of the room. The diagonal it casts across the ceiling shifts through the afternoon and is the only pattern in the space. Sheer linen curtains run the full height of the glazing, softening the city outside into a grey field.
Storage is buried. A tall white joinery volume on the left conceals the wardrobe, interrupted by one slim oak niche lit from within, where the owners keep four ceramic pieces from a potter in Mashiko. The framed grid drawing above the bed is the only artwork.
The studio resisted the client’s early request for a rug in a stronger colour, arguing that the room needed one temperature, not two. What arrived instead was a change in texture: sisal underfoot, brushed oak at hand height, smooth plaster above. The jury noted that restraint of this kind is easy to describe and difficult to build, and that the project’s quality lies in the tolerances — the shadow gaps, the flush cabinet faces, the way the platform edge lines up with the rug.
Aoi Kenchiku Studio was founded in Kyoto in 2013 by Rina Aoi, who trained as a carpenter before studying architecture. The office keeps a small joinery workshop on the ground floor and prototypes its own cabinetry, which is why so much of its work reads as a single continuous piece rather than assembled parts. Six people, roughly eight projects a year, mostly private residences in Kyoto and Kanazawa. The studio publishes nothing during construction and photographs its interiors only after the clients have lived in them for a season. Aoi took over the workshop from her former master in 2019 and still spends one day a week at the bench. The office turns down projects that require it to specify furniture it has not seen in person.