Nendo’s Storytelling #Nendo

One of the most iconic and creative firms today, the Japanese company Nendo was founded in 2002 by architect Oki Sato. Sato named the company after the Japanese word for “clay”, considering that his job should be as flexible and pliable as clay.

Indeed, Nendo’s production moves effortlessly through all imaginable disciplines and sizes, from stationery products to shopping centers, also including graphic design, furniture and housing, and resulting in a series of refined products, apparently common and simple, although original, surprising and enigmatic deep inside.

Oki Sato affirms that his way of thinking about the design of an object or a house is the same, although the technical process is totally different. In any case, there is always a story, a narrative behind the product, be it an umbrella, a chair or a house, that seeks to generate a connection with its user.

It is about what kind of story you can find behind the object, whether it's products or architecture or graphics. It is all the same to me Oki Sato.

In the globes of the Corona series, the oceans are represented in white and the continents in black, thus highlighting islands and coastline. In the same way, in the Bouncy Layers furniture collection, upholstery and cushions are replaced by flexible polycarbonate sheets, which cushion the user’s weight due to their curvature.

The same will to create unconventional but not flamboyant pieces extends Nendo’s architecture. In the Stairway House, the staircase literally pierces the house, linking the garden and the ground floor where the elderly parents reside with the rest of the house and breaking the facade and the floor slabs in the process. In the Book House, shelves and books protect its inhabitants’ privacy and filter the light both day and night.