Vol.2 — When a Tool Becomes Essential

On a Wakayama factory, a quiet brand, and why a building at a five-way crossing became SMOKE.

My wife's family runs a knitting factory in Wakayama, now led by her younger brother as the third generation. Since the 1970s, vintage knitting machines have been running there — not preserved as nostalgia, but maintained because they produce something modern production cannot.

From that factory, a quiet brand was born: kitt.

Only kitt

The fabric is unexpectedly light, remarkably soft, yet resilient. It holds its form through repetition. It does not collapse after wear. It adapts.

But what convinced me was not its technical merit.

It was something my wife said during a period when her health was fragile.

"I don't want to wear anything else. Only kitt."

In that moment, clothing stopped being aesthetic. It became reassurance. It became something closer to architecture — a structure that protects the body and steadies the mind.

I wanted to bring this to more people. And I only wanted to do things I believed in.

A Building at a Five-Way Crossing

So I began looking for a space.

I visited many properties over nearly six months. None of them felt right.

There was one building I had passed before — at the corner of a five-way intersection in Shimogamo, covered in pale green tile. Something about it stayed with me. It had been a tobacco shop, and in Japan, tobacco shops were once permitted only on corner plots, where foot traffic converged. The corner was the right to trade. This building had held that corner since 1912.

The first time I saw it, I was not ready. But the space sat in the back of my mind.

When I passed it again months later, it was still available. That, I decided, was an answer.

Designing the Interior

As an architect, the space came after the decision — not before.

The plot is narrow and triangular, like a wedge pressed into the city. I divided it into three long strips: a raised platform, a passage, and a counter. Narrow, but with depth. The western quarter opens to the intersection without walls — half inside, half out — a place where the street and the shop dissolve into each other.

After renovation, one interior wall was painted lime yellow. Vivid, warm, unexpected — a quiet declaration inside a building that had stood for over a century.

The hanger rack was designed to echo the structure of a jersey knit — a detail no visitor has ever noticed, and one I could not leave out.

The counter is matte grey. The raised floor is black. The old columns remain where they always stood.

There is an American painter whose work I have always admired — that particular quality of light and enclosure, of a place set apart from the street yet entirely within it. I kept that feeling somewhere in mind as I worked.

Why SMOKE

When it came time to name the shop, the building spoke first.

It had been a tobacco shop. Smoke felt right.

But beneath that, something else. Paul Auster's film Smoke — a story about a man who photographs the same street corner every day, believing that if you look closely enough, every moment is different. That idea had stayed with me for years.

The name held both: the building's history, and a way of seeing.

Every day, I photograph the five-way intersection outside our door. Same corner. Different light.

kitt is available year-round at SMOKE Kyoto — the only permanent stockist in Japan — and ships worldwide from our online store.