Shop the best Japanese wares at Nakagawa's London pop-up

Japanese craft retailer Nakagawa has made its European debut in London, designed by Jones Neville with graphics by A Practice for Everyday Life.

Nakagawa, which can trace its roots back to 1716, stocks stylish household items made by more 800 artisans around Japan – from aprons and tea-sets to brooms and bento boxes – all designed to age gracefully with use.

The brand already has more than 60 directly managed stores in Japan, with pop-ups popping up in Taipei, Shanghai, Beijing and Seoul.

Inside Nakagawa's London pop-up

The 10-month pop-up in Shoreditch follows on from a shop at Tokyo’s Narita International Airport, designed by Yosuke Hayashi of Tokyo-based design studio, which opened in 2024. There, the display system comprised a collection of vermillion wooden volumes resembling oversized trunks.

Jones Neville, which straddles furniture-making, product and exhibition design, and architecture, was asked to make a shop in this bijou 5msq space that related to its surroundings.

'They wanted it to feel in context in London,' says co-founder Simon Jones. The client showed them one of the brand’s famous patterned dish cloths made from mosquito netting, folded into four with a diagonal stitch line.

Jones and Jack Neville took that module concept as a starting point for their design, and combined its geometry with the Victorian octagonal bandstand in nearby Boundary Garden, a local symbol of community and cultural gathering.

For the layout, they overlaid these two shapes. Around the edge of the room, they built and installed a low plinth in an octagon, with wall panels hiding storage and display shelves. And in the centre, there’s an octagon table, displaying more wares.

The cork floor echoes the same modular grid system, with some of them into triangles. As a result, the floor has the same square pattern with a diagonal seam as the dish cloth, and relates to the facets of the octagons.

The north London-based duo lined the room with joinery, to make it square, and added storage in the alcoves. The sales counter is angled at 45 degrees, and behind that they turned a little stock room into a changing room.

Rather than ape Japanese joinery, which is typically cedar or cypress, Jones Neville sourced sycamore, with its pale tone and even grain, from Warwickshire in England’s West Midlands. This was used for the worktops, central table and storage doors. 'It seems like an appropriate nod to the quietness of Japanese joinery,' Jones says of the sycamore.

A Practice for Everyday Life hand-painted the shop signage onto the back of the fan light above the shop door and onto a wall panel inside.

In Shoreditch, around 500 items will be on show, including textiles, ceramics, kitchenware, home accessories, and clothing. Part of the pop-up are two limited-edition dish cloth designs inspired by the nearby Columbia Road Flower Market, which will be exclusive to this store. They are a rendition of Nakagawa's famous Hana-Fukin dishcloths, originally derived from mosquito net fabric and ideal for modern kitchens for their lightweight, quick-drying, highly absorbent material.

The pop-up will also host workshops in tea ceremony, kintsugi (golden repair), and traditional ice shaving.

The pop-up is open until July 2026. Tuesday–Saturday 11:00–18:00, Sunday 11:00-17:00
16c Calvert Avenue, Shoreditch, London E2 7JP