Still Life with S.T,N.E. #2 Kenichi Kobayashi (Nibandoori Wine Shop)

Furniture is life

Text:  Kenichi Kobayashi

I was sitting at a round table, writing the manuscript for a book called Nibandoori Wine Shop. Maybe it was the reassuring weight of the thick tabletop. Or maybe it was the form itself—somehow nostalgic, reminding me of the low dining tables of old Japanese homes, the kind a Showa-era father might have flipped over in anger. Whatever it was, the table made me feel at ease.

I was sitting on a woven chair. I love the texture of the material—it reminds me of chairs I came across in the homes of producers while staying in France. More than anything, it is simply comfortable to sit in. Outside the earthen-walled building, the trees sway and their leaves flutter in the wind. The table and chairs seem almost to receive that landscape.

We have been creating a place called Wine Park, in a small patch of forest that remains in a residential neighborhood. Before opening it, I wanted to bring together everything that had led us here in a single book.

One of the themes running through that book—through all the encounters and connections we had made with so many producers—was the idea of “building a nest.” And while I was writing it, my wife and I were having the biggest fight we had ever had. We had been married for twenty years. It was what you might call the biggest threat of divorce in my life. I never imagined a day like that would come. I should say this now, before I make anyone reading this worry: my wife and I made up, and today we are building a good relationship again.

The road to creating Wine Park was extremely difficult.

We wanted to share in Japan, in Hokkaido, and in this place what we had experienced in France. But simply bringing something from France to Japan would not have been right. My wife and I thought about it desperately. We spoke with many people, worried endlessly, and sometimes clashed with one another. Eventually, after all of that, this place came together. One of the people who became a major presence along the way was Tok.

What was missing?

We talked about that question constantly with Sakae-san, the stonemason. Sakae-san is a stone craftsman from Hyogo who created the stone paving outside and the stone wall in the kitchen.

He saw how much we were struggling night after night and introduced us to Tok. I had heard that Tok was someone very important to Sakae-san. I also somehow sensed that he was not the kind of person Sakae-san would introduce to just anyone. And yet, he introduced him to us.

This may sound rude, but at the time, we did not know who Tok was. Still, from the way Sakae-san spoke about him, we wanted to meet him. I had a feeling there might be an answer there.

To our surprise, Tok came to see the place almost immediately.

I do not think it was simply because he was quick to act. I think it came from the trust he had in Sakae—and, though it may sound a little presumptuous of me to say so, from intuition. At the time, only the foundations had been built. Tok came here, felt the atmosphere of the place, looked through the architectural drawings, and took our concerns far more seriously than we had expected.

By then, we had already seen the furniture he had made over the years and had begun to understand his work in our own way. What was interesting was that he did not have an immediate answer. Tok thought about it seriously. He struggled with it alongside us and took the time to really engage with the place.

The words of his that have stayed with me most are: “Don’t give up until the very end.”

I had assumed that if you asked someone extraordinary, they would simply give you the answer. But even someone like Tok has plenty of things he does not know. The difference is that he does not give up. I remember being deeply moved by the way he confronted the problem with even more determination than we did. He gave us so much advice, and afterward, we wanted to know more about him. So it was not long before we went to Osaka to see him.

Tok had just launched a brand called S.T,N.E. He let us stay for two nights at the house he had recently built, and we spent time together. There is so much I could say about Tok’s house, but I will leave that for another time.

Breakfast.

At the round table, Tok, the four members of our family, and Sakae-san—the stonemason who has always been there beside us—sat down together for breakfast.

We love antiques. And when I think of France, I think of the many hours we spent gathered around long tables with many people.

But there was something especially comfortable about the time we spent around this round table.

It felt as though the time we had spent in France somehow overlapped with the familiar feeling of an old Japanese dining table. Rice bowls. Miso soup bowls. Dishes filled with a warm breakfast that had been prepared for us that morning. At a round table, there is not much of a boundary telling you who belongs where. And yet, each person somehow creates their own place while remaining aware of everyone else’s. The boundaries are gentle. It has the same generosity as the tables we gathered around in France, but the distance between people feels closer, and somehow more comfortable.

It was strange how the time I had spent in France and the time around this table could feel so close to one another.

During the two days we spent at Tok’s house, I had another encounter that would change my life.

It was a sofa.

Tok had prepared a bedroom for our family, but one night, after we had been drinking together, I sat down on the sofa in the living room. It was so comfortable that I felt as if I were being pulled into it.

My mind, which had been occupied entirely by work and Wine Park, suddenly seemed to want a rest. Before I knew it, I had fallen asleep on the sofa. And I did it both nights. He had gone to the trouble of preparing a bed for me, so it was terribly rude. But I could feel that my body needed it. As if it were telling me: just melt into this. Until then, I had never thought I needed a sofa in my life. But I will never forget those two days spent on that sofa. It was someone else’s sofa, and yet it felt like a companion I had been missing all my life. I was forty-four years old, and I almost regretted having lived that long without knowing this feeling.

Tok laughs when I say it, but I told him that until then, I had never realized a sofa could be as essential to a life as a car.

There is now one of those sofas on the second floor of Wine Park. And to return to where I began, I am now sitting at the round table in front of the kitchen on the first floor.

I think Tok’s furniture contains the same kind of richness I experienced in France.It is not that things have been stripped away. It is that only what truly matters remains.

And somehow, that feels connected to what the producers in France—the people who changed our lives—also value.

Once we placed Tok’s furniture at the heart of Wine Park, the entire building changed.

Furniture is life.
There are things you can only begin to understand once there is life in a place. Without that, we had been trying to think about the building only as a larger framework. If we had never met Tok, I think we would still be lost.
A place where people live. A place where people spend their time.
Instead of starting with the larger frame and working inward, you begin with people’s lives and allow the frame to grow around them. Furniture is incredible.

I would really like to talk about the S.T,N.E. lighting as well, but that belongs to another view, another story, so I will leave it here. I hope you will come to Wine Park someday and see the rest for yourself.

Today, as always, we spend our days at Wine Park surrounded by Tok’s furniture.

The small moments of richness and gentleness held within S.T,N.E. furniture continue to accumulate quietly around us, enriching our lives in ways we may not even notice.