nendo

The interior design and brand development for a fitness club by Ebisu Station in Tokyo.

Since Illoiha Ebisu provides a full range of facilities for women, including yoga, a lava bath and an variety of fitness programs, we wanted our interior to express the idea of becoming beautiful through physical movement. For the ceiling of the gym's main traffic area, a 50-metre corridor, we found a type of film that appears transparent when seen from straight on, but only semi-transparent when seen from an angle, and layered the film over a long textile, so that customers only see the true beauty of the textile pattern when they are moving down the hallway. We thought we'd take a material ordinarily used to hide things that we either don't want to see or don't want to be seen, and to use it to show something off instead.

All of the graphics drive from the golden rectangle, the mythical "perfect proportion" of 1:1.618. We chose gold as our key colour, used the golden rectangle as the basis for all of the graphics, and even chose a name, "Illoiha," that is a homonym for "1.618" in Japanese. Working from the concept of ideal body balance, we also created a character whose head is a golden rectangle, and had the character appear in various places to make the brand image seem closer and more familiar.