How Do You Want to Design Your Life?

Casa Yuko is the only building Ettore Sottsass ever designed in Japan — a vivid, Memphis-spirited Tokyo residence completed in 1992 for a close friend and design pioneer.

The first thing Ettore Sottsass asked Yuko Oshima, when she visited his Milan office in 1980, was not about architecture or colour or form. It was: how do you want to design your life? Oshima, who had no ready answer, found the question so arresting that it reoriented everything that followed — her career importing Italian design to Japan, her years of travel between Tokyo and Milan, her deepening friendship with the man who had just asked it. Twelve years later, in 1992, Sottsass completed the only building he ever designed in Japan. He designed it for her.

Casa Yuko sits on a corner plot in a central Tokyo residential neighbourhood, its pink exterior — custom-ordered from INAX to a colour Sottsass chose in Oshima's image — announcing itself against the surrounding fabric with the unapologetic confidence of Memphis itself. The movement Sottsass had led through the 1980s, with its vivid palettes and radical rejection of good taste as an aesthetic constraint, is present in every room: a blazing red dining room, a pistachio green study, a living room anchored by a purple B&B Italia sofa, mosaic Bisazza tiles running across the terrace that Oshima describes as the house's emotional centre.

"How do you want to design your life? It is very important to think about it." — Ettore Sottsass to Yuko Oshima, Milan, 1980.

The building's relationship to Japan's urban regulations is characteristically irreverent. The northern diagonal restriction — the planning rule that limits building height adjacent to neighbouring properties — shaped the roofline into an angled form that Sottsass accepted with something approaching irony, treating legal constraint as design opportunity. South-facing windows, adjacent to a neighbouring house, are frosted glass. A cabinet embedded in the living room's trapezoidal window is clad in aluminium to resemble the back of a truck — a reference, Oshima recalls Sottsass explaining, to the truck drivers he considered Japan's most freely self-expressive citizens.

In 2019, after nearly three decades, Oshima undertook a comprehensive restoration rather than the reconstruction her builders recommended. The pink walls were remixed to the original specification. The house, which functions simultaneously as private residence and living museum of Sottsass's work, emerged unchanged. "When I'm here," she told him on the day he first saw it completed, "I forget everything and am happy." He replied that this was precisely why he had designed it.

Key takeaways

• Casa Yuko, completed in 1992 in central Tokyo, is the only building Ettore Sottsass ever designed in Japan — a three-storey residence in which every detail, from the custom-mixed pink exterior to the blazing red dining room and pistachio green study, was chosen personally by Sottsass for his close friend and owner Yuko Oshima.
• Sottsass treated Japan's urban planning restrictions as design material rather than obstacle, turning the northern diagonal restriction into an angled roofline and embedding a truck-back aluminium cabinet into the living room as an ironic tribute to the self-expressive freedom he admired in Japanese truck drivers.
• Oshima undertook a full restoration of the house in 2019, refusing reconstruction in favour of returning the building precisely to its original appearance — an act of preservation that mirrors the same spirit of protecting design integrity that Sottsass himself embodied throughout his career.