Location: Tokyo, Japan

Design Team: Fumihiko Sano Studio

Area: 90 m²

Year: 2024

Photography: adhoc / Daisuke Shima

Design Features: In a 90 m² space in Jingumae, Tokyo, Fumihiko Sano Studio has created GEMMYO's first boutique in Japan for the Parisian jewellery house. Instead of reproducing recognisable Japanese or French motifs, the design breaks both cultures down into columns, beams, ceilings, floors and textiles, allowing the brand's cross-cultural identity to emerge through movement and observation.

The decisive intervention is a timber framework that stands independently within the existing shell. Octagonal cedar posts suggest the presence of round columns, while nested beams organise reception and three guest rooms as connected spaces that never become completely sealed boxes. The structure also acts as a subtle visual boundary, defining rooms through distance, sightline and density rather than continuous walls.

Pale marble ceilings sit above the timber frame, while French herringbone flooring runs beneath it. These materials are not assembled as a stylistic collage; they work through contrasts of weight, grain and scale. Cedar brings warmth and fine texture, marble lifts the ceiling's brightness, and the herringbone pattern directs movement through each consultation room. Mirrors and openings multiply these layers, lending the compact interior a shifting depth.

At the street edge, custom Kyo Karakami paper from a craft tradition more than three centuries old is paired with Nishijin textiles. Rather than covering the entire room, these surfaces occupy facade openings and moments of transition, creating a thin layer between display and concealment. The guest rooms also open toward a garden, where planting, fallen wood and moss introduce time and natural change into the precise timber-and-stone setting.

The principal jewellery display rests on a Rokko-stone pedestal that has been split and polished, evoking the transformation of raw material extracted from the earth into a finished jewel. Luxury is therefore expressed through controlled attention rather than accumulation: timber order, mineral weight and crafted surfaces slow the act of looking until each piece appears as something newly discovered.

Design Team: Fumihiko Sano Studio was established in 2011 by architect and artist Fumihiko Sano. Born in Nara in 1981, Sano began his career as an apprentice sukiya carpenter at Nakamura Sotoji Komuten in Kyoto before working in architectural practice and founding his own studio. This direct construction experience continues to inform his attention to craft, material, proportion and the contemporary interpretation of Japanese culture.

The practice works across architecture, interiors, products, installations and art. Its approach centres on uncovering, rediscovering and editing the histories and cultures accumulated in a place so that each project can contribute to what comes next. GEMMYO Tokyo Boutique was designed by Fumihiko Sano, Taku Arakawa, Tomoki Kato, Qi Puzen and Rintaro Nakayama, with construction by Matsui Construction Co., Ltd.