PARK by Sekisaka - an object from the in-between

There's that moment, just after you get home. Keys in one hand, glasses in the other, your wallet somewhere in between. You set everything down on the dresser, the kitchen table, the windowsill. And the next morning, you're searching again.

PARK is made for exactly this moment. But that's only half the story.

Echizen, and a word called Awai

PARK comes from Echizen, from the Kawada district near Sabae in Fukui Prefecture. Anyone who works with urushi - Japanese lacquer - ends up here sooner or later. Lacquer has been made in this area for more than three hundred years.

PARK is made by Sekisaka, a family workshop now led by its twelfth generation. Tatsuhiro Sekisaka, its current head, didn't take the direct route into the workshop. He studied in the Netherlands, at the Design Academy Eindhoven, and only returned to the family business afterwards. That double perspective - an European design school on one side, three hundred years of lacquer tradition on the other - runs through everything Sekisaka makes today. Lacquerware, rethought.

And then there's that one word: Awai. It means the space in between. The in-between. The place where something is not yet one thing and no longer the other.

Two kinds of in-between

The designer Akihiro Kumagai created PARK out of two Awai.

The first lies in Echizen lacquer itself. This region knows no strict border between craft and machine - from hand-brushed urushi to sprayed coatings, from a wooden core to a form of plastic, everything exists side by side. It's exactly this openness, this willingness to move with the times without losing the root - that has carried Echizen craft through the centuries.

The second lies in the object. A plate, a bowl, a tray - at heart these are only gradations of depth. PARK deliberately chooses none of them. Its form is a shallow half-pipe, drawn from the soft divisions of a serving dish. A calm, curved surface on which the lacquer comes into its own.

And the surface asks to be touched. The matte, faintly rough texture of the dry lacquer is something you feel only with your fingers - in a photograph it almost disappears. Only in the hand does it become the object's real character.

A fixed place for small things

Because PARK commits to nothing, it settles in anywhere in daily life. On a desk it catches what would otherwise scatter pens, your glasses, an eraser. In the entryway it becomes the fixed place that keys and a watch never quite have. Four quiet, muted colours are available, all drawn from the image of a park - none of them forces itself on a room.

For the dining table there's a separate answer: PARK in porcelain, in white. Only this version is food-safe as a shallow bowl, as a plate for pastries. The same form, thought twice: once in lacquer, once in porcelain. That, too, is an Awai.

PARK is exactly that kind of object. And that's exactly why it's at MALEY.

PARK by Sekisaka, designed by Akihiro Kumagai, made in Echizen (Fukui, Japan). Available at MALEY, Zurlindenstrasse 57, 8003 Zurich.