Espo Atelier

During lockdown 1.0 I decided to reach out to friends in the industry to offer any help. Luckily, my good friend Adam Esposito, an Interior Architect in Tokyo and like many during this time, decided to setup his own studio. With his valued direction, we created his identity.

We started with the name. Espo being an abbreviation of his last name Esposito, and Atelier, an artist's or designer's studio. Adam had been experimenting with the craft of ‘Kumiko’ after using the technique on a past project for Twitter’s head office in Tokyo. We started to explore this technique as a monogram.

What is Kumiko?
Kumiko is a delicate and sophisticated technique of assembling wooden pieces without the use of nails. Thinly slit wooden pieces are grooved, punched and mortised, and then fitted individually using a plane, saw, chisel and other tools to make fine adjustments.

The monogram is a combination of the studio’s initials E and A using the build style of Kumiko. I then experimented with movement to represent the elevation of floors and walls, starting from the ground up.