Step inside this rare Shiro Kuramata-designed cocktail bar in Japan

Shiro Kuramata famously viewed his designs as transient, fragile, fleeting, never expecting the immateriality of his creative vision to last for long. Today, as Kuramata anticipated, few of the countless interiors that he dreamt up have survived since his death in 1991.

Get spirited away at Comblé Bar

One space, however, is still around and now back on the creative radar: a cocktail bar called Comblé, in the city of Shizuoka, a few hours west of Tokyo on Japan’s Pacific Ocean coast. Located on the first floor of an otherwise nondescript building, the bar displays Kuramata’s signature use of geometry and sweeping curves fused with floating components, a bold palette and striking materials such as acrylic, glass and terrazzo.

The bar is one of the few intact Kuramata-designed interiors known to still exist, and a growing number of fans are making a pilgrimage to experience the space first-hand. Its reopening coincides with a revival in interest in the designer’s work: his first solo retrospective in Tokyo in more than two decades, ‘A Microcosmos of Memory’, recently finished at the Setagaya Art Museum, before heading to the Toyama Prefectural Museum of Art & Design.

The bar first came to life in 1988, just three years before Kuramata’s death, and it was one of a series of projects that he worked on in Shizuoka, a scenic region famed for its green tea production and traditional crafts. A desire by Kuramata to keep the space as a ‘cube’ underpins the design, with two transparent plastic sheets folded together creating the large, arced curve of a ceiling that appears to float – an effect enhanced by backlighting the material.

A lighting system by Ingo Maurer can also be found on the back wall, while the terrazzo floor contains light-emitting diodes. There are playful blocks of colour, embodied by a vivid red aluminium wall panel, a curvaceous counter in yellow fibre-reinforced polymer, and the blue legs of the circular bar tables. Equally eye-catching are the bar stools, with their near-invisible half-moon backs of transparent acrylic, as well as a missing component in one of the four legs.

The bar is believed to be one of the few remaining Kuramata spaces open to the public in Japan. Umenoki, the Tokyo sushi restaurant designed by Kuramata in the 1970s, is currently closed, while another sushi restaurant, Kiyotomo, was relocated to the M+ art gallery in Hong Kong a decade ago.

The bar’s owner, Masahiko Nakayama, says, ‘The bar never feels old. Even after 30 years, it still feels fresh. I love how, despite the presence of numerous materials and different colours, it doesn’t feel chaotic. Instead, it presents a harmonious world.’ For him, the goal is simple: to offer visitors a peaceful, relaxed and calm experience in this unique space. ‘Of course there are local residents that are frequent visitors. There are also lots of customers from the design, interior and architecture worlds. And there are many pure Kuramata design fans. People come from all over Japan to see the bar.

Comblé Bar is located at Seizen Bldg. 2F 2-7 Gofukucho, Aoi Ward, Shizuoka City, @comble.bar

A version of this article appears in the June 2024 Travel Issue of Wallpaper*, available in print, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News +. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today.