Step inside this uncommon Shiro Kuramata-designed cocktail bar in Japan

Shiro Kuramata famously considered his designs as transient, fragile, fleeting, by no means anticipating the immateriality of his artistic imaginative and prescient to final for lengthy. Right this moment, as Kuramata anticipated, few of the numerous interiors that he dreamt up have survived since his loss of life in 1991.

Get spirited away at Comblé Bar

One house, nonetheless, remains to be round and now again on the artistic radar: a cocktail bar referred to as Comblé, within the metropolis of Shizuoka, a number of hours west of Tokyo on Japan’s Pacific Ocean coast. Positioned on the primary flooring of an in any other case nondescript constructing, the bar shows Kuramata’s signature use of geometry and sweeping curves fused with floating parts, a daring palette and putting supplies corresponding to acrylic, glass and terrazzo.

The bar is without doubt one of the few intact Kuramata-designed interiors identified to nonetheless exist, and a rising variety of followers are making a pilgrimage to expertise the house first-hand. Its reopening coincides with a revival in curiosity within the designer’s work: his first solo retrospective in Tokyo in additional than 20 years, ‘A Microcosmos of Reminiscence’, lately completed on the Setagaya Artwork Museum, earlier than heading to the Toyama Prefectural Museum of Artwork & Design.

The bar first got here to life in 1988, simply three years earlier than Kuramata’s loss of life, and it was one among a sequence of initiatives that he labored on in Shizuoka, a scenic area famed for its inexperienced tea manufacturing and conventional crafts. A want by Kuramata to maintain the house as a ‘dice’ underpins the design, with two clear plastic sheets folded collectively creating the massive, arced curve of a ceiling that seems to drift – an impact enhanced by backlighting the fabric.

A lighting system by Ingo Maurer may also be discovered on the again wall, whereas the terrazzo flooring accommodates light-emitting diodes. There are playful blocks of color, embodied by a vivid crimson aluminium wall panel, a curvaceous counter in yellow fibre-reinforced polymer, and the blue legs of the round bar tables. Equally eye-catching are the bar stools, with their near-invisible half-moon backs of clear acrylic, in addition to a lacking element in one of many 4 legs.

The bar is believed to be one of many few remaining Kuramata areas open to the general public in Japan. Umenoki, the Tokyo sushi restaurant designed by Kuramata within the Nineteen Seventies, is at the moment closed, whereas one other sushi restaurant, Kiyotomo, was relocated to the M+ artwork gallery in Hong Kong a decade in the past.

The bar’s proprietor, Masahiko Nakayama, says, ‘The bar by no means feels previous. Even after 30 years, it nonetheless feels recent. I really like how, regardless of the presence of quite a few supplies and completely different colors, it doesn’t really feel chaotic. As an alternative, it presents a harmonious world.’ For him, the aim is easy: to supply guests a peaceable, relaxed and calm expertise on this distinctive house. ‘After all there are native residents which can be frequent guests. There are additionally a lot of clients from the design, inside and structure worlds. And there are various pure Kuramata design followers. Individuals come from throughout Japan to see the bar.

Comblé Bar is positioned at Seizen Bldg. 2F 2-7 Gofukucho, Aoi Ward, Shizuoka Metropolis, @comble.bar