Yamagata Dantsu is proud to announce their newest addition to their designer line, with “TOCHI” and “KOU” from Mikiya Kobayashi. He is renowned for his diverse designs, ranging from furniture, household products, and textiles. He had known about Yamagata Dantsu and was thoroughly impressed with our reputation for colors and our expertise, leading to us starting a project together. Here he talks about how the importance of balance of placement of the carpet and its user is greater than that of design. Together, his penchant for incidental beauty in everyday life meets “A Warm Welcome for Every Foot”.
Mikiya KobayashiDesigner
Born in 1981 in Tokyo, he founded his own studio in Tokyo and Valencia after an experience in an interior design company.
He is working in many design fields such as furniture, daily products, electronics, mobility as well as space design.
Deeply rooted in a lifestyle that is considered jointly with clients, his design is also able to merge into its surrounding space.
He recieved many awards such as iF Gold Award and Red Dot Design Award in Germany.
In 2018, he starts his own original lifestyle brand IMPLEMENTS.
This collection is designed by designer Mikiya Kobayashi.
An interview about the story behind the designs, introduction to Yamagata Dantsu, and future plans.
I was able to attend one of the Yamagata Dantsu exhibitions, and I felt that all the architects and designers’ compositions were amazing. I remember being extremely impressed with watching the process of mercerization, a process to make a new carpet looked aged, when I visited the workshop for the first time. I thought that dulling the colors like that made the carpets prefect for use in modern living spaces. I think that the balance between how the carpet matches the existing décor with the users life is more important than the design of the carpet itself. So for the new design, I wanted to not rely on the mercerization process, but I used a trial and error process with the expertise of Yamagata Dantsu’s craftsmen’s color creation skills to make the carpets perfect for today’s modern living.
I had this idea that I wanted to make a design that captured the simple beauty of everyday things like the sunlight or wood grain. With “TOCHI”, I chose to use Japanese Horse-Chestnut, because it has such a unique silk-like patter in its grain. I thought that characteristic would work well with a carpet so I tried various colors and saturations to really bring out the Japanese Horse-Chestnut pattern. With “KOU”, I wanted to use light as the central motif and I was racking my brain as on how to do it. Then I thought about how looking out the same window at the same scenery at different times of the day, dusk changing to midnight, changing to dawn, gives completely different colors. I thought that was beautiful. That’s where I took my inspiration from, then I encapsulated the beauty of the changing colors of light throughout the day in the carpet design for “KOU”.
To me, there are two classifications of furniture. The first is things like chairs or sofas, things that you use with your body. I call them “things close to people”. The second is things like tables and shelves, things that you don’t normally move around. These are “place holders”. Carpets are “place holders” but carpets are special; they organize the space and they help tie everything together, I think. Of all the home furnishings, carpets have the most power to change the look and feel of a space, so I feel they should be utilized pointedly. Carpets can change how you live, if I can tell people that a carpet can bring some more joy to a room, I think that more people would like to use them.
