build your own japanese room

Despite being one of my most frequently accessed posts on the Internet, this is also one of the least read. Even though my Japanese room might not look anything at all like the one you envision, I think it's still worth a read if you're looking for ideas. By being creative and buying materials available in local stores, it is possible to create a nice look without blowing your budget on authentic tatami floors and paper screen doors.

My summer project involved renovating our small study. We had always called it the tatami room, but there was very little Japanese about it. It was so unsightly, in fact, that I couldn't even find a picture of the room to use as a "before" photo. I started by ripping out the aging carpet, the mismatched shelving, and the curtains. This necessitated some wall patching before the painting could begin.

With the paint colour I was aiming for something like one would find on the walls of a rustic tea house. I used Sico #6113-74, which is marketed as Oat Bran. It is a higher end paint, so no primer was required, but two coats were necessary. Upon finishing, it seemed like I missed by a tone. In the daytime, the ochre seems a bit too bright, but in the evening the effect with the shadows on the wall is exactly what I was aiming for. Perhaps Rye Spike (#6113-84) would have been a better grain of choice, but I have no regrets about how it turned out.

Once the paint dried, the most difficult challenge was laying the hardwood floor since I had never undertaken a project like this before. The website Hammerzone provided outstanding step by step advice for the initial preparations and the laying of the floor itself. Despite the fact the walls in my room weren’t square, when I got to the end of the job, my last piece of wood was square to the door thanks to their advice.

Acquiring authentic tatami mats for the flooring was beyond our budget, so we tried to make the most of materials readily available locally. Thus, we chose a coffee coloured bamboo floor, with a horizontal grain to create a rustic Asian feeling. The colour is achieved by heating the bamboo until it caramelizes. One unexpected side effect of this process is a subtle brown sugar scent that it leaves in the room. Even though bamboo is typically sold with a thickness of 5/8 of an inch, I had no trouble using a pneumatic nailer designed for traditional 3/4 inch floors.

The task I enjoyed least was preparing and putting up the baseboard, perhaps because it was harder to cut the softer woods precisely than it was when I worked with the bamboo. I went with a plain three inch mahogany baseboard and oak quarter round. In an attempt to match colours with the bamboo, I started with a coat of Minwax Natural finish (209), then added a second coat of their Special Walnut (224). The result was a dark brown that pulled out the darker colours in the floor and tied the lighter tones in the wall and floor together nicely. I did a reasonable job matching the angles at the corners, but had some difficulty installing the baseboard when I took a store clerk's advice and tried LePage's No More Nails to attach the baseboard. For a variety of reasons, I found the product next to useless, and went back to nailing everything in the old fashioned way. Fortunately, I found some walnut coloured finishing nails that blended nicely. Unless you were on your hands and knees looking for them, you would never notice they were there. For this reason, I don't see how it's worth the risk of having the No More Nails adhesive squish out and alter the colour of the stain or paint when you try to wipe off the excess amount. It also adheres poorly to walls in older homes that might have a warp in them.

I also benefitted from listening to my wife when shelves entered into the discussion. The previous owners had three shelves running the length of one wall, so I had a similar configuration in mind, possibly with fewer shelves. When my wife remarked on how much more open the small (50 sq. ft.) room looked with the walls bare, we started exploring corner shelf options, eventually settling on some cheap unfinished pine corner shelves from Jysk. I finished them the same way as the baseboard. They turned out a little darker, but still fit in well with the overall decor.

It took a while to find the right window covering for the room. I got lucky and found a bamboo blind that matched the floor colour and offers sufficient privacy and sun protection for a room that only receives a bit of light through its largest window in the morning.

I ran out of time before I could make a transition piece between the tatami room and the hallway. The only other finishing touch I have in mind is continuing the baseboard around the built-in shelf to frame it. Those minor considerations aside, we considered the room essentially finished once we added a tatami floor mat that was carried back in a suitcase a few years ago. Along with the pride that comes with completing a project like this comes the satisfaction we experience during a rare moment of quiet spent reading or writing in the room. We might live thousands of kilometres from Japan now, but at least we have a small piece of it in our home.

Travis Belrose is the author of The Samurai Poet, a work of historical fiction set in 17th century Japan. Learn more here.