AS THE FOUNDER of the streetwear brands A Bathing Ape and Human Made and the artistic director of the French luxury brand Kenzo, the designer and record producer Nigo has, over 30 years, asserted himself as one of the most revered aesthetic talents in Japan. So, last decade, when he decided to erect a concrete shelter by the sea, he surely could’ve commissioned Tadao Ando, Kengo Kuma, Shigeru Ban or any of the other Japanese architectural legends known for building such structures. Instead, as Nigo, 53, explains via a translator one gray morning last May, he wanted to hire “someone who hadn’t done a house in Japan but had done these kinds of beach houses.”
Standing in the wide, low main room that comprises the 1,735-square-foot home’s bottom level, it’s clear he means a beach house that treats the Pacific Ocean not as leisure-time amenity but as central architectural feature: When you stare out past a bespoke 10-by-22-foot wall-to-ceiling glass panel — conjuring Piet Mondrian paintings as much as shoji screens — that can be accordioned open to access an empty, railing-free waterfront concrete deck, the sea (increasingly violent as an afternoon storm approaches) feels so much a part of the property that it might more accurately be called its backyard. Inside, the shiny terrazzo floors reflect its movements; in the metallic kitchen, behind the living and dining area’s vintage wooden furniture and opposite the view, there’s a reflective, polished stainless-steel backsplash above the sink that, despite being farther from the waves, somehow brings them even deeper into the room, almost as if it were an undulating mural.
Nigo bought this small piece of land — enough for just the house itself and a gravelly car park out front, next to a busy road and some ungainly construction — in 2019, both because of its proximity to the coast (his cruiser boat is moored somewhere off in the distance) and because of the seclusion it offers, especially compared to Tokyo and Kyoto, where he has houses he travels between when not working in Paris. It’s in a town he doesn’t want named a few hours south of Tokyo that’s “quite good,” he says, “because the access is so bad.” Rare for Japan, there’s no train station here, an inconvenience that has, despite the region’s somewhat grim naval-industrial character, transformed it into a bastion for people like the Undercover fashion designer Jun Takahashi, who often comes by for meals. “When I visited the area, I just loved the environment and the atmosphere of the surroundings,” says Nigo, an avid fisherman.
Like most polymaths, Nigo had a precise vision about what he wanted but just needed to find the right person to help him execute it. After a long search, his associates discovered Takashi Yanai, a partner at the Los Angeles- and San Francisco-based firm Ehrlich Yanai Rhee Chaney Architects, which had released a monograph in 2019 that included West Coast projects with the sorts of details — indoor-outdoor floor plans with bold apertures and natural vistas; clean, rigid, almost monolithic structures and proportions — that Nigo himself had imagined. When the Japanese-born American Yanai, 55, got the call to come in for a meeting, he was by coincidence already in Tokyo, where the architect worked for several years as a design journalist before getting married, having two kids, moving to the United States and creating buildings rather than just writing about them. “It fell out of the sky,” Yanai says, “but this house happened shortly after I told myself and my staff that I wanted to make this conversation between California and Japan a center of what we do.”
SINCE THE DAWN of California Modernism in Los Angeles nearly a century ago, the minimalist rooms, spare materiality and open-air layouts of classical Japanese design have remained not just influential but inherent: The Austrian architect R.M. Schindler studied in Vienna at the beginning of the 20th century, when the city was in thrall to the visual movement known as Japonisme; by 1922, he’d finished Kings Road House in West Hollywood, with its tilt-slab concrete exterior, redwood joinery and informal studio-inspired flow, all of which were indebted to the East. Schindler had originally gone to California to work for Frank Lloyd Wright, who first visited Tokyo in 1905, inciting a lifelong connection with Japanese design — one shared by Richard Neutra, as seen particularly in his pavilion-like Case Study Houses. When Charles and Ray Eames completed their own Case Study House (No. 8) in Pacific Palisades in 1949, they similarly incorporated low furniture, a central courtyard garden and large openings — in the form of sliding doors and window coverings — further developing the Japanese-inflected midcentury American style.
Eventually, this cross-cultural vernacular made its way through Europe and back to the other side of the Pacific. For decades, the iconic Modernist furniture born out of the era has been popular at auction in Tokyo: Nigo himself traded in Eames chairs before amassing pieces by the likes of Isamu Noguchi, Jean Prouvé and Pierre Jeanneret (long before the Kardashians did, his translator clarifies). Some of the homeowner’s favorites take pride of place throughout this dwelling’s two floors — where the downstairs seating and dining area is arranged like a “container of his collection,” as Yanai puts it, and upstairs, in the primary suite and sole guest bedroom, there are a few leather lounge chairs, upholstered daybeds and wooden desks and stools poetically arranged so that they look out to the horizon beyond. The only new furniture is a combination desk and bed in oak, with separate mattresses for the designer and his wife, the actress Riho Makise, 52, with whom he likes to hold tea ceremonies in their faithfully constructed machiya (a traditional wooden townhouse) in Kyoto. For the guest quarters, there are eight L.L. Bean sleeping bags, each folded into a cozy pod in the spirit of a Japanese capsule hotel. You can imagine intimate parties here — there’s an external staircase that allows people to go immediately upstairs and change out of their wet bathing suits after a day on the boat. But so far, there have been no overnight guests. The designer’s friend and sometime collaborator Pharrell Williams visited recently, the prospect of which was slightly worrying: “You can come here, but there’s nothing to do,” Nigo told him.
Mostly it’s a place to empty his brain, he adds, somewhere “good for the soul.” Yanai, who notes that Nigo communicates with “images and very terse expressions,” says his client had one such picture in his mind from the very beginning: an anonymous house he’d seen somewhere, big, with a view out to a verdant garden. Today, many contemporary Japanese architects pay homage to American Modernism, often with an obsessive focus on materials and techniques that make these structures feel lighter and more pristine than their predecessors. “We knew the level of craft and building in Japan is something that we don’t always get in California, especially with concrete,” Yanai says.
But perfection is never without its hidden exertions. At first, the sliding glass wall didn’t provide any mosquito protection, so Makise had it remade with an imperceptible mesh screen. And in most of the house, there are board-formed concrete walls that help the architecture draw attention not just outward to the environment but inward to the beauty of wood’s natural grain. However, when it came time to subtly tint them a soft gray, the contractors mistakenly chose a paint that was too opaque, covering the walls’ texture. Ever the designer, Nigo had a solution: He hired a few people to spend seven months with tiny brushes recreating the whorls and swirls that had been obscured. All that effort was worth it, of course — even if only he can tell the difference.
