Interview with Atsushi Murakami | An Experienced Architect with 20 Years of Broad Experience

What made me interested in becoming a designer was when I was working at a restaurant before all this! When I was working in the restaurant, I realised I particularly enjoyed communicating with customers and I thought to myself; what if I run a cafe of my own in the future? I could even design it myself, with my own preferred designing and architecture.

My company is called "design Chill-out inc.", it is based in Tokyo, Japan. My company specialises in architectural designing and interior designing.

Design has a very broad meaning, for me, design is choosing your resources from many things and deciding on using what and how to make it a reality. Design is a solution to your problems, solving problems using the many items and resources available!

We all live in the present, so personally I like modern designs. However, I also understand that they are based on history. Hence we cannot deny that traditional design is part of us and exist as inspiration to modern designs.

I mainly do commercial design, and since business success is the proposition, I think that a design that achieves that proposition is a "good design."

The idea came from the client's concept, the surrounding environment, and the given conditions. With the client's concept giving a clear vision and view for me to design on, I was able to come up with the idea of using discarded tea leaves to be integrated into the design.

When planning the designs, it was supposed to be a Chinese sweet store in Japan. Hence I thought about how to incorporate Japanese elements into the Japanese modern design. The good thing is, that there was an existing store nearby that had tea leaves that were discarded. I knew this was a great chance to utilise and use it in the design for the store, providing a rich aroma to the store's design.

Thank you! It is an honour to be judged by esteemed judges from the London Design Awards and to be crowned a winner of the awards. It is encouraging and an honour indeed!

Cost control is important, especially when designing a small-scale store like this. By using readily available materials rather than special materials, we were able to keep costs down, while also creating an original and special space by devising cutting methods and details.

In addition, used tea leaves were dried, crushed, and mixed into the plastering materials. Even after being mixed in, the fragrance and slight colour were extracted, and the texture was also evident, resulting in a unique finish.

I recommend going out to experience more things in life, have a look at a lot of things, and talk to a lot of designers to learn more.