Architectural

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Jasper Morrison Shop

2008

A shop selling everyday useful objects beside the London studio.

  • Photograph: Nicola Tree

Timeline

I visited Sori Yanagi’s studio in Japan in 2001 and afterwards the little shop selling his products across the yard. I didn’t know it at the time but it was his daughter who served us. I was so impressed that he took the trouble to sell his own products, not for the money because in such a hidden place it could only be pilgrims like me who would discover it, but because he knew he had done a great job and he believed in the results.

When I found and bought our London studio there was quite a bit of extra space and I quickly decided it should become a shop. I wanted it to sell things designed by me and others and to sell anything that seemed both useful and desirable. It should be a shop for everyday life with specially chosen products that would be hard to find eIsewhere. The room behind it was supposed to be the meeting room, but imagining myself sat in that room having meetings filled me with gloom and I realised meetings should happen anywhere other than in ‘meeting rooms’, so the shop became twice as big and we have used the back room for exhibitions as well. The first of those exhibitions gathered together typologies like ‘jugs, jars and pitchers’, ‘drinking glasses’, ‘trays’, ‘tape’ etc. These exhibitions were an excuse to explore those typologies and assemble many examples of the same thing to show how much variety there can be amongst objects serving the same purpose. Although the shop can interrupt our design work occasionally it’s the best way I know to express and communicate what we do and to make sure that what we design can meet a certain standard of usefulness and everyday beauty.