Cassina IXC
There’s a furniture store on the first floor of the building where I work out. They have designer furniture from the greats like LeCorbusier and Mackintosh. It’s like a museum actually. The cool thing about this store is that it has a café inside. So you can sit on $11,000 chairs and eat Vietnamese noodles and sip very strong iced coffee, served by silent black-clad waiters. I never entered before because it looks expensive and well, pretentious. But actually 1,000 yen will get you a very tidy meal, al dente. For directions click here.
There’s the usual pampered young Shibuya housewives with their ignored kids dressed in designer garb. And there are always groups of what looks to me like designers of some sort. They are dressed in dark clothes, wear ironically chunky glasses, and their haircuts are sculpted into well-placed disarray. And they always have at least one open laptop and some very important papers scattered about their tables.
Still, it’s a totally chill atmosphere. It’s never crowded, never noisy. There’s not even any piped-in music. The only sounds are the sounds of self-important chatter and the street noise outside. But it’s all absorbed nicely by the furniture.
I sat on the long counter, soaking in the first pleasant day of autumn. Scribbling in my notebook and then spacing out at the minimalist flower arrangement in front of me.
Recommended Company: your friends in ‘design’ and architecture to smirk at the latest fads.
Suggested Reading: biographies of mid-century modernists.
Likely Activities: sketching perfect curves and concocting self-referential parodies.
Photo from the Cassina website, until I can take a decent picture of the place. Click on the picture for the source.
The Quilting Sword 