Last weekend (I can’t believe a week has already passed and I didn’t have time to write up something quick about this!) I went to an open house that my friend Tomoki Fukuya did the interior design for. I was interested because I haven’t seen the Fukuyas in a long time, and the house itself sounded very interesting. The house is 3.1 meters wide by 15.4 meters long: basically, a long, thin house. One of the challenges Tomoki faced was making a small space feel open – probably something that happens a lot in Japan. The top two floors are residential (rental) space, the first floor is an office space, and the bottom floor is a retail space. I didn’t really take many pictures – I should have, but I always feel strange pulling out the camera and snapping pictures – and now I wish I had.
I really liked how there was lots of storage space all over the place, it seemed really big and the lack of walls really made the place seem large. The bathroom was cool too: all glass (but there were blinds if you wanted them) that let in the light from the full window. Also also really liked the staircase and the bookshevles there. The concept was that kids would sit on the stairs and read, so the stairs are dual-purpose: you climb them, and sit on them. I was surprised that the place was a rental property instead of one up for sale. It seems like the place was going for a very reasoanble rate: about $1000 a month and it wasn’t too far from the train station. About a 5 minute walk, and it is about 20 minutes from Ikebukuro on the Tobu Toujou line.
The house itself kind of reminded me of the Austrian Cultural Institute in New York, a really cool narrow building.
On the way home, I took the Fukutoushin line back to Shibuya. That was the first time I had taken that line – it just opened up in June, and generally I don’t go very far off of my commuter pass, so that was kind of interesting. There is also a new station entrance in Shibuya station that I thought was kind of neat. There are other renovations going on in Shibuya but I just never go through that part of the station so I hadn’t seen this area yet. The colorful signs are really great.
It was also interesting to see people sitting around all over the place with little clicking counters they were using to count how many people were using the the different exits and corridors in the station. They really do a lot of profiling in this city to manage the congestion. So far though, from what I can gather, the Fukutoushin line hasn’t been too successful: it generally connects places that other lines also go to, so not many people have been using it. It was pretty empty when I took it too, so I wonder what is going to happen there. I’m glad that the line that I normally ride is pretty empty because it means I can sit on ride in. That is a lot better than my old commute, where I almost always had to stand, and it was usually crazy crowded.
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