We designed a retail complex called 50 Norman in Brooklyn, New York. It is a Japanese food-themed retail complex consisting of HOUSE BROOKLYN, a Japanese French restaurant, CIBONE, featuring Japanese ceramics and other cooking utensils, and Okume, a seafood processing store established in 1871 on the Tsukiji fish market.

For this project, we had to conceive the process to minimize costs while maintaining Japanese quality of design and production overseas. And we came up with DEKASEGI, an idea to process materials that would otherwise be dismantled and discarded in Japan, reduce their volume as much as possible, ship them overboard, and then bring several craftsmen to the site to assemble and process them locally in a short time. The Japanese word, DEKASEGI, originally means a temporary work away from home or overseas, or a person who does this kind of job. Here, we became DEKASEGI workers. Used and aged wood materials in Japan often retain their original craftsmanship, joints, and other features that give them a distinctive appearance. Our design sought to make the best use of such characteristics.

50 Norman was our first DEKASEGI project, and the planning began at the height of the COVID crisis and unexpected things happened continuously. The shipping duration became longer and longer, the cost of transportation also skyrocketed. Therefore, we decided to send them by air using as little volume as possible by building crates and packing the components tightly inside them. The idea was to use the crates as display stands for the stores. However, the air shipping cost began to soar when production began in Japan. Therefore, minimizing volume using the crate was no longer relevant. Instead, we decided to break up the components into smaller pieces and insert them into the limited space in the airplane. But at that point, we could no longer change our original design, so we had to disassemble the crates and insert the pieces into the gap for transportation.

In Japan, we cannot recycle and use old wood materials for construction, even though we understand their attractive qualities. Houses constructed of the quaint materials are still being torn down and burned. For this project, we decided to use materials that would otherwise be trashed in Kyoto to make fixtures for new stores opening in New York. When completed, what was trash in Kyoto became something precious in New York.

To assemble and build them on site, we accompanied TANK, our Japanese production team. Since we have always struggled to produce the desired results in overseas projects, we experimented with a method of pre-processing materials in Japan and transporting them to the site for assembly and fabrication this time. Local contractors did the water, electrical, and architectural fixtures, while TANK worked on the interior finishes, especially the parts customers would touch. As a result, we successfully achieved the same quality in the U.S. that we could in Japan.