Milan's Notes: Five Exhibitions from MDW 2026
Hidden inside a restored seventeenth-century building in the Marais district of Paris, OGATA unfolds gradually.
A tea room appears first. Then the scent of roasted tea. Timber surfaces. Handmade vessels. Quiet transitions between spaces. Beyond them: restaurant, shop, gallery and collections of objects that sit somewhere between craft, ritual and daily life.
Opened in 2019, OGATA was never intended as another Japanese restaurant abroad. For its founder, Shinichiro Ogata, the project became the culmination of almost twenty years of thinking about how Japanese culture could be experienced as a whole. Not displayed, not preserved behind glass, but lived through objects, gestures, hospitality and atmosphere.
The project is the work of Shinichiro Ogata, founder of Simplicity, the Tokyo-based studio established in 1998 that has spent decades moving between hospitality, architecture, interiors, branding and product design. Over the years, Ogata developed restaurants, ryokans, tea spaces and cultural projects throughout Japan, gradually building a practice in which food, objects, craft and atmosphere could no longer be separated. OGATA Paris became the most complete expression of that thinking.
Born in Nagasaki, Ogata grew up in a city shaped by exchange. Historically one of Japan’s principal gateways to foreign influence, Nagasaki carried traces of Portuguese and wider Western presence while remaining deeply connected to local traditions. He speaks of childhood surrounded by mountains, rivers and sea, but equally of inhabiting a place where different cultures had coexisted for centuries. Looking back, he describes this environment as the beginning of a sensibility that would later define his work: an openness to receiving, interpreting and carrying ideas across contexts rather than preserving them unchanged.
“I was raised in an environment rich in nature, surrounded by mountains, the sea, and rivers.”— Shinichiro Ogata
This attitude sits at the centre of OGATA. The project was never conceived as a reproduction of Japan abroad, nor as an exercise in cultural preservation. Instead, Ogata set out to translate a broader system of values — one built around coexistence with nature, seasonality, craftsmanship and attention to everyday rituals. Food became only one layer within that framework. Tea, sweets, vessels, timber, fragrance, paper, architecture and gesture all entered the experience with equal importance.As Ogata explains, a meal alone could never communicate the message entirely - “A meal in a restaurant is far from sufficient to fully convey my message.”
The experience had to extend further: to tea, to the tools used alongside food, to sweets, to atmosphere and to the rituals surrounding everyday life. Objects are not displayed as artefacts but remain active participants within daily life.
This reflects Ogata’s long relationship with Japanese craftsmanship and his belief that the role of the designer is not necessarily to master a technique, but to reinterpret traditional knowledge and allow it to continue within contemporary culture. Nature remains the constant reference point.
“Nature itself is my teacher of design.”— Shinichiro Ogata
His work repeatedly returns to ideas of impermanence, regeneration and coexistence. Wood, one of the materials he returns to most often, becomes symbolic not only for its physical qualities but for its place within cycles of renewal. In Japanese architecture, forests cultivated across generations support techniques that have survived for centuries; for Ogata this continuity offers a model not only for making, but for living.
The same thinking extends into the philosophical foundations of his work. Ogata often speaks about concepts such as Kū, Ma and Mu — emptiness, interval and absence — not as voids, but as conditions through which presence becomes visible. Meaning emerges through restraint rather than accumulation. Ultimately, bringing OGATA into the world was never only about opening spaces.
“The intention is to connect people and cultivate a shared sense of well-being.”— Shinichiro Ogata
The idea reaches far beyond hospitality. It is rooted in coexistence between people and nature, where craft, rituals and everyday gestures become part of a richer way of living. Perhaps this is why the project remains difficult to define — restaurant, tea house, gallery, boutique; each captures only one layer of it. We often feel a similar tension within The Orb. We speak about building ecosystems, small universes where objects, people, stories and experiences exist together rather than separately.
The quieter rhythm, devotion to craft and attention to ritual feel deeply familiar to us. This conversation will soon continue in Lisbon, where OGATA will become part of The Orb space, shaping the tea and food experience at its entrance — becoming part of the world we are building