The seamless integration of industrial and the simplest of craft poetics drew the Broached team to the work of Tokyo-based architect and product designer Keiji Ashizawa. The Hirosaki Knife Box was the tipping point, the piece that made us leap towards Keiji.

Prior to establishing a practice in his own name (2005) Keiji was a member of the Super Robot steel-furniture workshop. Keiji’s product design work has been exhibited in Pad London 2012 at Galerie Maria Wettergren; Design Miami 2012 at Galerie Maria Wettergren; and Wallpaper Handmade in Milan in 2011.

Keiji is the recipient of an Australian National Architecture Institute Award for Wall House with Peter Stutchbury Architects and Keiji Ashizawa Design. Keiji also received a Good Design Award, Special Award, from the chairman of the Japan Institute of Design Promotion.

Keiji Design continues the refinement of the modernist architectural and product design project with a graceful simplicity that Japanese designers seem to excel at. It’s as if the deeply embedded belief in incremental improvement fits hand in glove with the modernist insistence on simple geometries. Keiji Ashizawa’s work exemplifies this beautiful marriage of cultural tradition and modern industrial design.