GINZA FLAGSHIP STORE — CHABATEI 茶馬亭, 4F | 45R Official Brand Site

GINZA FLAGSHIP STORE — CHABATEI 茶馬亭, 4F

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The fourth floor is Chabatei, our gallery.

Named after the ancient Tea Horse Road, along which tea from Yunnan in China was once carried on horseback to Tibet, Chabatei is a gallery devoted to crafts for everyday life — ceramics, lacquerware, woodwork, and more.

It is also the tea room of the Ginza Flagship Store. Drawing on the aesthetics of chanoyu, the Japanese way of tea, we created a place set apart from the world outside. Sukiya details are woven into every corner, so wherever the eye rests, there is something quietly evocative to discover.

Step out of the elevator and stand before Chabatei, and a projecting roof overhead, together with earthen walls, marks the boundary between the outside world and the space within.

The roof is finished in hiwadabuki, a uniquely Japanese technique of cypress-bark roofing that dates back to the Asuka period. Specialist craftsmen layer dozens of strips of hinoki bark, each pared to around three millimeters thick, to build up the roof. Today, this rare technique is seen almost exclusively on cultural properties such as shrines and temples.

Pass through the entrance, and another world opens before you, paved entirely with hexagonal floor tiles.

These tiles are fired deep in the Chinese countryside. Because they are wood-fired, no two receive the flame in quite the same way, leaving subtle variations in color from piece to piece. The craftsmen have laid them in an orderly pattern, yet look closely and their shapes and sizes are each slightly different.

Like our clothes, their small irregularities carry the warmth of something made by hand, becoming part of the landscape of the room.

At the back of the room lies a vivid indigo field.

The carpet depicting this landscape is a Japanese hand-tufted textile known as dantsū. Working from an image of an indigo field drawn by 45R, specialist craftsmen built the scene stitch by stitch, driving wool into the surface by hand.

Here, in the middle of a city building, you can look out over the homeland of the indigo that colors 45R clothing — a field where ladybirds and honeybees gather.

The earthen walls of Chabatei are also the work of the craftsmen of Kusumi Sakan.

Mr. Kusumi, who has spent decades building tea rooms for the Omotesenke tradition, told us: “The tea room is a synthesis of Japanese arts. But there is nothing interesting about simply imitating that style inside a building in Ginza and making something that only looks ‘authentic.’ I wanted to create a tea room that breaks free from convention, so I made these walls as ‘punk’ as I possibly could. Unlike viewing works in a conventional white-walled gallery, I think this space offers a sense of discovery.”

The walls begin with black earth, followed by layers of brown and then white clay. Portions of the surface are scraped back to reveal what lies beneath, creating an earthen wall with an almost startling rawness.

The nesting display tables at the center were, like those on the first floor, remade from old storehouse doors taken from a traditional Japanese house.

The two pine boards, set at different heights, were once two parts of a three-door arrangement used together much like an exterior shutter, an inner door, and a screen door. The upper board was coated with earth to improve its resistance to fire, while the lower board still shows the plain, natural surface of the pine. The third piece, which did not become part of the display table, was apparently a lattice door designed to allow air to pass through.

The tables remain movable: they can be nested together when needed, or pulled apart to open out the display. The practical ingenuity of people from long ago still lives within them.

At Chabatei, tea can also be enjoyed in the ryūrei style, seated at a table.

The yellow-toned top of the temae-dai is made from a naturally bent kihada tree whose trunk curves in a broad shape like the Japanese character “く.” In a hollow formed as the tree grew powerfully on a mountain slope sits a natsume-shaped tsukubai, ingeniously used in place of a rodan hearth frame and supporting the tea kettle.

Even a piece of wood that might at first seem difficult to work with finds its place in the hands of Sankaku-ya’s master carpenter, who understands every nuance of the material — as though the tree had been waiting for this very purpose.

Here, you can enjoy a bowl of tea while taking your time with Chabatei and the works on display.

We are drawn to materials that are born from the earth.

Plants rise from the soil, becoming cotton and linen, then clothes, and one day returning to the earth again. We cherish that natural cycle. The Ginza Flagship Store was created around our idea of “from the field to the store.”

Within a space where clothing, earth, and wood come together as one, we hope you might feel, even for a moment, a connection back to the ground beneath us.

After leaving the Ginza Flagship Store, look back from Nishi-Gobangai Street and you will see hexagonal shoji glowing through the windows, coloring the street like a great andon lantern.

At night, their soft light falls gently across the path of those passing by.