Architect Takashi Yanai’s Los Angeles kitchen is the scale of his shoppers’ walk-in closets. A accomplice at Ehrlich Yanai Rhee Chaney Architects (and a graduate of Harvard’s College of Design), Yanai, who was born in Japan and grew up in Santa Monica, oversee’s the agency’s residential initiatives: he’s a grasp at designing clean-lined California dream homes which are all about indoor-outdoor residing.
His personal just lately reworked Nineteen Fifties ranch home, whereas far more modest in scope, is a microcosmos of the Yanai sensibility: Japanese formalism meets barefoot LA. We found Yanai’s place in Inventive Areas, the Poketo crew’s first e-book: see LA Noir: Takashi Yanai’s Humble-Stylish Bungalow. Right now, we’re returning to take a better take a look at the kitchen and its classes in spatial economics and understated model.
Pictures by Ye Rin Mok, from Inventive Areas.

After stripping the residing space to its naked bones, Yanai put up a partition completed with marine plywood that neatly divides the brand new kitchen from the lounge. And instead of what had been a “drained suburban kitchen,” he put in a single-sided galley utilizing parts from top-of-the-line German modular cabinetry firm Bulthaup. Yanai mixed these with a again storage wall of marine plywood, which conceals the fridge. And since the household was in want of a spot to work, as an alternative of constructing in a desk or island, he added a bookshelf and desk—a Danish-modern teak flip-top design by Peter Lovig Nielsen—and turned the opposite half of the room right into a research. Sure, there’s additionally a eating desk with a view (see under).
