Issey Miyake’s HaaT line has found a quietly luminous home in Kyoto, where Tokujin Yoshioka has transformed a 150-year-old machiya into a retail project that feels both assuredly local and gently unbound from time.
From the street, the façade reads as a restrained composition of charcoal-toned timber and latticework, its traditional geometry interrupted only by a pale pink noren that registers like a blush across the building’s surface. This chromatic shift is subtle but pointed: a signal that the renovation is not about reproduction, but recalibration.
Inside, Yoshioka treats the original structure almost as a collaborator. Heavy beams overhead remain exposed, their historical weight offset by walls washed in pink-white gradients and floors cast in a soft, continuous grey. The intervention is spare, but never austere. Clothing hangs in a linear sweep of colour and texture, suspended from an aluminium rail tinged with cherry-blossom tones. Against the edited backdrop, the garments behave less like merchandise and more like a study in textile topographies, their shadows creating a quiet, rhythmic tension across the room.
The pink motif, requested by HaaT artistic director Makiko Minagawa, becomes a connective tissue rather than an accent. On one side of the store, modular panels in rosé aluminium create a sculptural field for bags—objects presented with museum-like clarity, yet still grounded by the tactility of the materials around them. The palette feels unmistakably Kyoto: muted, atmospheric, guided by light rather than saturation. But it is also distinctly Yoshioka, whose fascination with translucency and reflection appears in mirrored surfaces that elongate the architecture and echo the timber eaves at the rear.
That garden-facing moment is the store’s emotional anchor. A wall of glass frames a small raked stone garden, where the machiya’s original eaves hover like an architectural haiku. On either side, mirrors create a near-infinite repeat of timber and shadow, collapsing past and present into a single gesture. It is here that the building feels most attuned to HaaT’s sensibility—a brand rooted in rigorous, cross-cultural textile innovation while refusing to sever itself from lineage.
Textile craft ultimately drives the narrative. The store foregrounds HaaT’s ongoing collaborations with artisans across Kyoto, Japan, and India, presenting materials such as Kumo Shibori and Roving Kogin not as nostalgic artefacts but as contemporary experiments in dimension, structure and handwork. Minagawa’s belief in sustaining craft through reinvention is embedded into the architecture itself: a space where tradition is not displayed behind glass, but metabolised into new form.
In Yoshioka’s hands, the machiya becomes less a preserved relic and more a site of continuity—a living frame for a design language that values care, restraint and the slow evolution of making. The flagship doesn’t shout its presence; it glows. And in Kyoto, a city shaped as much by silence as by spectacle, that glow feels exactly right.
