D1 SHARE FACTORY OFFICE

Across Japan, the small neighborhood factories that have long sustained local manufacturing are disappearing year by year, as their owners age and no successors step forward. Our client, a building-materials supplier that has served local makers for half a century, launched a venture called Machi-Koba Fudosan ("Town Factory Real Estate") to pass those skills and spaces on to a new generation. This project is its pilot: a former woodworking plant reborn as a shared factory used by several businesses, with its office section renovated to serve as the venture's public face.

The brief called for a place that would convey the joy of making things and the energy of a working shop floor: an exciting "secret hideout for grown-ups."

We stripped the unremarkable office interior back to its bare structure, keeping whatever was worth keeping, such as the distinctive Y-shaped steel column that props up the stair beam. Onto that frame we patched together humble industrial materials: lauan plywood, cement board, raw black steel pipe, checker plate, mesh panels, and chalkboard paint. For an accent, we chose a vivid blue troweled floor, which we finished ourselves, DIY-style, working alongside craftspeople from a range of trades.

To make the most of just 38 square meters, we turned the dead space above the ceiling into a storage loft and replaced the ceiling with sturdy expanded metal, opening the room upward. The stair that climbs to the loft doubles as storage and as the room's visual centerpiece. The office also works as a showroom, where visitors can handle actual samples of the furniture panels and hardware used in the shared factory's workshops. Every door and drawer in the stair unit uses a different fitting, so the differences can be felt by hand. The unit itself was built by the woodworking shop that rents space in the factory.

With a tight budget and schedule, we skipped detailed drawings. A simple floor plan and a 3D model were enough to share the vision, and the details were worked out on site, improvised in conversation with the client and the craftspeople. The distinctive atmosphere of this place, a bricolage of humble industrial materials, is inseparable from that way of making.