A knife worth keeping for decades cannot be chosen in a hurry, so Hanare, a 30 sq m room L/O set beside Tojiro’s flagship store in Asakusa, Tokyo, is built for the long conversation that commissioning one demands.
Next to Tojiro’s flagship store in Asakusa, where the full range of blades is laid out, a few steps lead to a second room. L/O (Katata Yoshihito Design) borrows its name and its logic from the hanare, the detached building that traditional Japanese houses kept for receiving guests and for private work. “Hanare is not a conventional shop,” the studio writes. Across thirty square metres, it answers a different need, the one-off, semi-custom and fully custom commissions: how a person cooks, the size of their hand, the weight and balance of a blade, the finish and handle that suit the work.
The distance is the method. A short walk shifts the register, from choosing among many knives to facing the one you need. “Such a decision cannot be hurried. It asks for an unhurried conversation, time to hold the blade, and time to think,” the studio writes. Nothing in the room is arranged to close a sale; it is set up so two people can sit, compare blades and talk at length.
At the centre, a stone selected in Niigata carries a raw, uneven mass, and above it a precisely worked glass plane appears to float. The table sets natural irregularity against industrial accuracy, the beginning of making against its finished object, in a single figure. Around it the palette brings Niigata, Tojiro’s home region, into Tokyo: Yasuda kawara, a centuries-old roof-tile clay, laid on the floor rather than the roof; plaster mixed with Niigata earth; Niigata cedar.
That cedar is charred, raised with uzukuri brushing, then coated. Heating, abrading and refining the surface track the forging, grinding and polishing of a blade. “The wood does not symbolise knife-making; it passes through a comparable sequence of transformation,” the studio writes. At the entrance, steel louvres hold two references in one element: the slender verticals of senbon-goshi screens, and the ordered rows of knives standing on Tojiro’s factory floor in Tsubame.
Katata calls the approach Industrial Modern Japanese, not a style that quotes traditional building but a method drawing at once on traditional spatial principles and on the industry and craftsmanship alive in Japan now, tradition continued as a working method rather than preserved as an image. Stainless steel and glass meet the light-absorbing surfaces of earth, wood, stone and tile. Completed in January 2026 and opened that March, the room treats a knife as something kept for decades, resharpened and repaired again and again. Its real provision is time: the space where maker and user find the single blade that fits one working life.
