Japanese interior designer Yukio Kimura has recently created a hybrid space that includes a café bar, second-hand bookshop and art gallery all rolled into one. Situated in Osaka and located in a suburban area, away from the commercial centres, the store was designed to ‘not’ blend into the surroundings, which came about by following the client’s wish to reflect the store’s name; Sorayumebako (roughly translated to ‘Dreambox’), into the actual design. Yukio explains: “Sorayume” is a Japanese word meaning “a fabricated dream”, that is, a dream for telling people as if you actually dreamed it. Having this concept in mind, I designed space where visitors can feel as if they stepped into another world, like a dream”.

The entire space is painted orange – the walls, ceiling, floor and furniture. This, according to Yukio, interprets the time between day and night, summer and winter and yin and yang – a place where visitors can change their mindset from the yang (daily life) to the yin (private life). The interior is lined with wooden grid supporting shelves for the books and frames for the artwork, which together with the boxed entrance and view from the street supports the second part of the name, ‘bako’ (a box).