Its own weather

Most studio websites are brochures. You read them, you leave, and nothing happened while you were there. We wanted ours to be a place: somewhere that already had weather before you arrived, and keeps it after you go.

So the top of this site is a small meadow above a river valley, early in the morning, just after rain. A sakura, a stone lantern, a house with a veranda, a vermilion torii where the ground falls away, and the sensei sitting under the tree. None of it is a photograph. Every stone and roof tile was made for this page, slowly, until it felt like somewhere you could stand.

One wind

We started with the wind, because a meadow is mostly wind.

There is only one. The grass, the blossoms, the falling petals, the far trees, the paper lantern and the chime under the eaves all stand in the same air. When a gust crosses the meadow you can watch it reach each of them in turn: a long band of bowing grass travelling downwind, then the sakura letting go of its petals in a small flurry rather than one by one, and last of all the chime, with a small shiver.

Two small whirlwinds wander over the plateau as well. Each lives for about half a minute: it gathers, drifts with the wind, turns the grass around its moving centre, and fades, and another begins somewhere else. Most people never notice them. Watch for a minute, and you will.

The grass also knows where your hand is. Move the cursor across it and the blades part in front of you and rise again behind, like a meadow brushed with open fingers.

After rain

It has just rained. The stepping stones up to the veranda are dark and wet, moss creeps against them, and small puddles on the path each hold a piece of the pale sky. Up close, the grass carries beads of water that catch the light as the wind turns it. Even the petals are wet, and ride the wind a little less.

Under the tree the sensei sits in seiza on a flat stone, a paper lantern at his side. He breathes, slowly, about once every five seconds, and doesn’t open his eyes when you arrive.

Mist, and first light

The last layer is the air. A Japanese landscape is mostly what you can’t quite see: ridges paling into blue one behind another, cedars standing in the mist between them, a pagoda half lost on a far slope, a morning light that hasn’t made up its mind. So the meadow sits in a low dawn behind thin cloud, and the mist belongs to everything in it, near and far.

When you scroll past the first screen, you walk into that mist until it covers everything, and the page rests on it while you read. Under the mist, the meadow is left alone. Nothing is drawn that nobody can see, so your phone gets to rest as well. At the very end of the page the mist thins again, and you come out at the torii, looking over the valley.

A lamp left on

In dark mode it is the same place under the moon. The stone lantern is lit, the paper screens of the house glow from inside, fireflies rise out of the grass, and every light wears a soft halo of mist. The house keeps a lamp burning, the way you would for someone coming home late.

Why bother

A website could have been a logo and an email address. But we make small things for particular hours of the day, and we wanted the first thing you see from us to have an hour of its own.

A place doesn’t ask anything of you. It lets you stand there for a minute.

That is roughly what we hope our apps will feel like, too.