Step aside Harajuku; Omotesando, the high-end fashion district of Tokyo is fast becoming our favourite destination in the city, with a little help from young design house nendo’s recent additions.
'We want to reconstitute the everyday by collecting and reshaping small moments hidden in our everyday into something that's easy to understand,' explains Oki Sato, the mastermind behind nendo.
In the context of Tokyo’s ILLOIHA fitness centre, this design ethos translates into one of the most creative concepts for a gym we’ve seen. 'To express the original brand concept of becoming beautiful through movement, we chose the theme of rock-climbing on Omotesando, and developed a design that uses the mismatch between a rugged outdoor sport and Tokyo's fashion district to its advantage.’
Forget fibreglass stone and mock rock overhangs, nendo designed the wall to resemble a chic country house interior made-up of baroque picture frames, mirrors, deer heads, bird cages and flower vases instead. The effect is not just unusually sightly for a relatively drab-looking sport, but gives climbers a euphoric feeling of illicitly climbing the walls of a grand exhibition space.
