Hasta La Ideas

This boutique by Japanese designers Nendo is full of fake doors.

The extra doors break up sight lines in the long narrow Indulgi clothes store in Kyoto, meaning customers must explore the interior if they want to see all the merchandise.

Each door forms part of the shop’s display system, sporting rails, hooks, shelving and mirrors.

Back in 2009, architects Ninkipen! created a similarly surreal but more sinister shop lined with eleven fake doors and only one real exit, while Nendo themselves caused controversy among our readers last year with their mental health clinic where none of the doors open so patients and staff must open sections of the walls to move around – see what all the fuss is about in our earlier story or read more about it in the Dezeen Book of Ideas.

You can also watch Oki Sato of Nendo talking about his work in our interview on Dezeen Screen and see all our stories about Nendo here.

Photographs are by Daici Ano.

Here are some more details from Nendo:

Indulgi

A new shop “INDULGI” designed by nendo opened in Kyoto, Japan. A small clothing shop in Kyoto’s Nakakyo district.

The deep, narrow space has good sightlines, but this can be dangerous, too: a shop can look messy and the interior space simply uninteresting if visitors can see all its products in one glance.

We decided to add shielding elements to create a space that could never be seen in its entirety, one in which different elements appear and disappear from view, changing customers’ experience of the shop as they move about it.

Walls create an over-strong sense of pressure, and the space already contained a number of doors, so we added even more doors to it. We set the doors open and closed at different angles to control the degree of visibility, and the mix of ‘real’ and ‘fake’ doors gives the space a slight sense of surreality.

We added functionality to the ‘fake’ doors, using them for hangers, shelving and mirrors, and furnished them with fixtures that spill out from inside in different colours and textures to create even more variation in the space.

Opening one door brings not only surprise but the desire to open the next, creating a space that evokes curiosity in all its visitors.

53-1 Takakura Higashi-hairu,
Nakagyo-ku Sanjo-Street,
Kyoto 604-8111