In 2009, Master Makiko Wakita set out to create a traditional tea room where she could hold tea ceremony lessons. The result is a Japanese corner that evokes the sensation of truly being in Japan.
The construction of the tea room required careful planning, in-depth study of materials, and the skilled hands of expert craftsmen, in order to achieve a result faithful to the traditional principles and standards. Her tea ceremony master, Kazuie Murayama, gave the space its final artistic seal through his precious and concluding contributions.
To understand the meaning of such a place, we quote a passage by Giangiorgio Pasqualotto, taken from "Aesthetics of the Void": The tea room, or chashitsu, is the physical space where the ceremony takes place, but it is also a ‘spiritual’ space. The ideals of Zen aesthetics have been distilled into it.While it is true that the artistic use of emptiness can be observed in almost all forms of East Asian art, there is one place where emptiness seems to concentrate and manifest its presence and function most clearly: this place is the chashitsu, the tea room.
The emptiness celebrated in this space—beyond the physical and aesthetic—is also moral and mental. The silent waiting in the adjacent room (machiai), before being invited into the chashitsu, deepens the release of the last echoes of turmoil and passions that inhabit the world and disturb daily life.”
Having the opportunity to enter a true tea room is both rare and unique—an opportunity that Master Makiko Wakita offers to her students.
