TORAFU ARCHITECTS

The interior design for the Tokyo office of Australian skincare brand Aesop, whose store interior designs TORAFU continues to work on. We renovated the two adjacent buildings at the same time.
The common approach we took for the two buildings was interpreting the history of the interior layered by the changes of previous tenants and embodying Aesop’s character in the interior by using partial demolition. In addition, we paid considerable attention to sustainability. We actively preserved the disassembled wooden beams for future use in stores, as well as repurposing items such as meeting room doors and lighting fixtures from the office before relocation, and other things that were no longer used at the store.

Office B is a three-story reinforced concrete building with a large atrium space. In addition to the office, there was a request for a training room, a dining room with a kitchen where employees can have meals together, and a pantry.
For the office space on the first floor, the walls and ceiling are re-painted in the cream color, used for Aesop’s packaging, while maintaining the existing open space and flooring. Only private rooms such as the meeting room and the phone booth, were finished with birch wood as nested boxes. We installed the rooms between the office and backspace and defined them as hybrids of architecture and furniture, which gently divide the single-room space. We used mortar to fill the repaired parts of the floor that appeared after the dismantling of existing walls and staircases instead of covering them with new flooring of the same material, to leave them as a part of the building’s history. In the atrium space, indirect lighting with task lights and upper lights ensures the illuminance necessary for work, while the natural light from the top lights creates a lighting environment where changes in time and weather can be felt. For the training and conference room on the second floor, we proposed using flexible furniture such as chairs with removable mini tables and a large table with a top plate on AA HIGH STOOL so that various layouts can be arranged according to the purpose. On the third floor, which was a restaurant, is a dining room with a long table where employees working separately in the two buildings can communicate.

While avoiding turning the building into a complete skeleton, we considered the existing parts as one of the materials. We carefully selected the combination of old and new like a patchwork, aiming to create a rich and warm space typical of Aesop.