The Hiroshima Chair by Naoto Fukasawa from the Maruni Collection, launched in 2008
It was fate that bought together Japanese furniture brand Maruni and London furniture showroom Viaduct at the Milan Salone del Mobile in 2005. The director of Viaduct, James Mair, stumbled upon Maruni’s stand at the show and was impressed by its 2004 Nextmaruni series, a range of furniture by Japan’s leading contemporary designers.
Unbeknown to Mair, the directors of the Hiroshima-based company then visited the Viaduct showroom. Although sympathetic to Mair’s process of selecting furniture, it wasn’t until four years later that Maruni brought its latest collection to the UK at Viaduct.
Complementing the Clerkenwell showroom’s 1930s industrial building, the clean-cut beech- and oak-wood tables and chairs on show are from the Hiroshima range by Naoto Fukasawa. For Mair, however, this only represents a portion of what he hopes to bring to Viaduct in the future, including the simple, yet varied Nextmaruni series, which first caught his eye in Milan.
Indeed, Maruni has pioneered impressive wooden furniture since it was founded in 1928. Following industrialisation in the 1920s, even before large Japanese manufacturers such as Toyota had been established, Maruni started mass producing furniture at its Showa Mageki Kojo (bent-wood factory) in Hiroshima.
Developed under the slogan ‘industrialising craftwork’, the company’s innovative technology enabled it to bend wood without complicated manual skills. Affected by the economic crisis in the 1990s, Maruni decided to look back to its origins, and began questioning the value and identity of Japanese culture, which had been lost during its rapid economic growth. Studying traditional aesthetic values, the company rediscovered the importance of physical sensations, characterised by the expression ‘haptic’, which has been explored by Japanese designer Kenya Hara.
For a long time in Japan, the texture of wooden architecture has been celebrated through touch and the Japanese style of living: taking off shoes indoors, and sitting and sleeping on the floor. Responding to an increasingly westernized society in Japan, Maruni’s recent collections suggest that chairs, more than other type of furniture, have the potential to heighten our experience of touch, as they come in contact with the body much in the manner of clothes.
This philosophy typifies the Nextmaruni series for which international designers including Jasper Morrison, SANAA and Fukasawa have been commissioned to create chairs that present their own understanding of a Japanese aesthetic. Imbued with each designer’s personality, the result points towards a new approach to Japanese culture.
