As a school project, I was asked to design a chair made of my favourite material. 

 

I like wood because my childhood was always surrounded by soaring pieces of wood, either in the woodland garden (my grandfather was a botanist) or in a Japanese tatami-floored room with timber columns. 

 

One strand of chair design tradition resonates with such a feel: wing-back chairs. The one designed by Charles MacKintosh reminds me of a hollow oak tree in which a person can enter. This gives me an idea of the chair frame, made of vertical plywood strips arranged in cylindrical shape.

 

As a Japanese person who grew up by sitting on the tatami mat floor, I always find it uneasy with a chair. I want to blur the boundary between chairs and the floor. The motif of being surrounded by trees in a woodland leads to the image of the ground covered with fallen leaves in autumn, which inspires me of leaf-shaped cushions, made of robust paper, to fill the chair frame to create a seat as well as to be scattered across the floor to act as a seating cushion on the floor.