New in the Shop, Wood Worker Mitsuru Maeda

Today we’ve got a new entrant in the store who goes by the name of Mitsuru Maeda. Born in Tokyo, the Japanese craftsman has been manipulating wood for over 15 years. After working at two different workshops during his career he took the jump and started his own workshop in Toyko, where he still makes and resides to this day under the company name ‘Ki-to-te’.

As well as tableware, what we’re currently stocking in the shop, Mitsuru mainly dabbles in furniture design where he produces pieces focused around simplicity and function, with a distinct and unique Japanese flavour. When he produces his wooden vessels and cutlery he starts off by taking them to the lathe and then uses decorative hand carving, protecting it with an oil finish at the end to give it a long life span. Hopefully you’ll appreciate these objects as pieces of art but ultimately they’re purely functional and are supposed to be used by humans as productive tools.

I thought I’d bring across some fantastic ‘outtake’ style photography all snapped by Daniel Benning, who’s been busy trying to photograph these for the shop. We’ve been experimenting with a mixture of backgrounds, also natural light vs studio light, which as you can imagine has been interesting to see in terms of results. It’s not easy getting the right balance but we’re definitely seeing a massive amount of progression on the photography front and hopefully you’ll notice that too.

Overall we’re really chuffed with the selection that we’ve picked and it’s great for us to represent such a unique craftsman and tell his story to everyone over here in Europe, and worldwide to be honest. So why not visit the shop and see what you think?

www.shop.the189.com/mitsuru-maeda

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