miCo.

miCo. is an architectural practice in Setagaya, Tokyo, organised as a collective of independent designers. Established in 2008, the practice is associated with architect Mizuki Imamura, who studied architecture at Meiji University and worked at Kazuyo Sejima & Associates from 2001 to 2008. The current team also includes architect Nobutaka Kawai.

miCo. describes its approach as making architecture together with everyone involved while living alongside the environment and the wider world. Its work spans houses, apartment buildings, interiors, furniture, offices, retail and exhibition spaces, grounded in clear spatial organisation, close observation of everyday life and careful responses to site conditions.

Pet Hotel & Salon ONE SQUARE in Komae, Tokyo, occupies a small two-storey timber building. The design gives dogs an experience outside their everyday routine, much as travellers encounter unfamiliar places. The boarding rooms are treated as small houses with windows and arranged as an abstract village landscape. Patterns made from two different line widths overlap on transparent acrylic surfaces, appearing as graduated textures at close range and as windows and houses from farther away, creating transparency, depth and varied impressions within the compact interior.