16th November 2015

Scenes from the Studio: Sfera in Kyoto

This week, we’re proud and excited to be bringing Sfera to London for the first time in their 14-year history. Anyone coming to the exhibition at Clerkenwell London (17–21 November, btw) will get to appreciate the beauty and craftsmanship of the furniture and homewares they create – but finished products are only ever part of the story.

Last month, I was lucky enough to travel to Kyoto to visit Shigeo Mashiro and the Sfera team in their home town, as well as travelling all over the region to see the craftspeople they collaborate with at work on the new collections. That was a real privilege, and an experience I’ll never forget. There's no way I'd ever have been able to find those people, let alone meet them, visit their workshops and drink green tea in their homes had it not been for Sfera.

So they’re a company I’m especially happy to be collaborating with – partly because I’ve loved their products from afar for a long time, and partly because they took me behind the scenes of the process of creation, showed me traditional craft in practice, and enabled me to bring home a phoneful of images like these…

Image captions:

1. The beautiful exterior of the Sfera Building in Kyoto. 2. Founder, Shigeo walking his dog Tonton at dusk. 3. The river at sundown. 4. Piles of bamboo at the studio of one of Sfera's partner makers. 5. Japanese cards and images adorn an enclave wall on a side street. 6. Up in the mountains visiting a master carpenter. 7. Some of the carpenters stunning carved floor planks. 8. Even the tape measures are beautiful. 9. Pet goats, why not?! 10. Watching the copper vessels take shape, a really exciting process from matte to shine!

- Sabine x