‘It feels like something out of a movie’: Studio I-IN designs the Tokyo office for Japanese haircare brand Kinujo

It’s been seven years since Studio I-IN was founded by Yohei Terui and Hiromu Yuyama. In that short time, the Tokyo-based designers have carved out an enviable reputation for creating delicately nuanced spaces and offices for their blue-chip corporate clients including Cartier and Ya-Man.

I-IN’s latest project for tech-led pioneers of Japanese hot hair tools Kinujo, is yet one more feather in its cap: an office space that balances brand diktats with practicality. The first time either party has worked with the other, the office is an exercise in restrained material and colour palettes requiring judicious balancing of spatial planning and porous natural lighting.

Studio I-IN’s spatial design for the Kinujo Tokyo office

Kinujo (the name combines the Japanese words for ‘silk’ and ‘woman’) was founded in 2014 by Tomoaki Hamada who cannily spotted a market for sleekly designed, tech-forward hair dryers, curlers and straighteners. The company’s rapid expansion beyond Asia into the American, Middle-Eastern, Australian and European markets meant that in no time at all, it had outgrown its offices in Tokyo’s Chiyoda quarter.

As Terui and Yuyama tell it, Kinujo needed a functional and sophisticated workspace in alignment with the brand’s identity that also reflected the elegance of its products. At the same time, the office would need to inspire creativity and collaboration between staff.

A chance conversation with the relative of a Hamada honcho led the Kinujo team to I-IN, who quickly recognised the potential for creating an office space to meet the brief. It helped that Hamada had picked the fourth and fifth floors of Escalier Rokubancho for his new office, the stacked volumes of the Ethnos-designed building almost mimicking the unfolding tongs of a Kinujo appliance.

The square-shaped footprint of the almost 3,000 sqft space allowed I-IN to create an open-planned office awash with natural light flowing through a decked terrace, comprising working areas, a lounge, stock counters, product displays and a presentation room.

Taking cues from the minimalist designs and metallic surfaces of Kinujo’s styling tools (which include hairdryers with built-in infrared technology), Terui and Yuyama were careful to keep embellishments to a minimum, focusing, instead, on clean-edged lines and right-angled ceiling grids of stripped lighting. Meanwhile, dividing walls clad in mirror-finished stainless steel and polished concrete pillars create luminous corridors.

To counter the potential severity and coldness of so many hard surfaces, the designers introduced graduated hues of tan, Kinujo’s house colour, on walls and fixtures, alongside metallic gold paint for the covers of desk wiring, and customised textured glass that doubles as wall art.

Arguably, the most striking moment is the generously proportioned hemispheric desk, anchored by a leafy planter at the midpoint, in the centre of the office. ‘It feels like something out of a movie,’ says Hamada. ‘It’s so reminiscent of a secret intelligence agency.’

But beyond providing plenty of room for hot-desking and small break-out meetings to plot Kinujo’s global follicular takeover, the desk’s curves are also a subtle riff on silky hair; the raison d’être, after all, of any hair appliance and the other half of Kinujo’s brand and moniker. ‘We translated the concept of silk into the design through our use of fluid lines in the textured glass artwork, and soft curved work desks,’ say Terui and Yuyama.

Equally captivating is a freestanding fluted marble wall framing the circular desk. Its striated, glowing three-dimensional linear design reflects the delicate flow of hair, but, also stands like a monumental painting.

‘This wall turned out to be more impactful than we’d originally anticipated,’ the I-IN designers add. ‘When the panels were fully assembled, the depth and texture and luxurious touch they added to the whole space was really quite striking.’

i-in.jp

kinujo.jp