For the interior of this dried food store in Tokyo, Schemata Architects painted fixtures and fittings the same shade of red as the skinny building it is set inside.
Called Yagicho, the store occupies the ground floor of a slim, nine-storey office block in Nihonbashi, Tokyo, that was designed and built by the Hishida Construction Company in the late 1970s.

Yagicho has a 280-year history of selling traditional Japanese dried foods including katsuobushi (dried bonito), konbu (kelp), and shiitake (Japanese mushroom) ? the three basic ingredients that are used to make dashi, a soup stock that forms the base of Japanese cuisine.

Measuring just 3.65 metres wide, the store has been completely renovated by Tokyo-based studio Schemata Architects, which began by painting the interior the same colour as the building's original red facade.
"Observing that the red resembles the colour of dried bonito, we decided to use it as the base colour representing Yagicho's identity," explained the studio.
"We made wooden boxes for display in the main store space out of MDF in the same colour, and placed them in stacks to create a space resembling a marketplace."

A cash counter island in the centre of the store doubles as a demonstration kitchen where shop assistants show how to make ichiban-dashi (soup stock).The architects said they positioned the counter in the centre so as to create a "non-hierarchical communication between hosts and guests".
The ar...