New Balance’s Latest Tokyo Store Made From a Repurposed Kura

In Tokyo’s Nihonbashi district, New Balance’s 15th Japan store—named T-House New Balance—is unmarked but unmissable. Accessed through a set of sliding doors on the all-white, windowless façade, the inside boasts an intricate system of wooden beams above the showroom floor. The store used to be a 122-year-old kura (a clay warehouse and merchant home) that was located in Kawagoe, a town northwest of Tokyo. This …

Interview: HempWood Founder Greg Wilson

A new sustainable design material enters the market with innumerable benefits

A patent-wielding Willy Wonka-like character who whips up sustainable building and design materials from various fibers, Greg Wilson has released details on his latest developments that focus on the dynamic, controversial hemp plant. His creation, HempWood, and its parent company, Fibonacci, are based out of a factory in a former cornfield in West Kentucky. And there, Wilson’s day-to-day workload includes educating consumers and imagining the …

Inside New Canaan, Connecticut’s Enveloping “At The Noyes House” Exhibition

80 works of art and design within an iconic mid-century modernist home

Harvard Five architect and IBM industrial designer Eliot Noyes’ mid-century modernist home currently hosts an enveloping exhibition, At the Noyes House: Blum & Poe, Mendes Wood DM, and Object & Thing, that transports guests out of time and place. In the same Connecticut town that draws architectural tourists to the Philip Johnson Glass House, New Canaan, the Noyes House exhibit sees the work of 34 …