Yakisugi and Shou Sugi Ban
The coal-black aesthetic of Japan.
It seems a little strange that wood is not destroyed but refined when it is burned. In Japan, however, this technique of preserving wood has a long tradition - one of the oldest and still preserved wooden buildings in the world - the five-storey pagoda of the Horyuji Temple in Ikaruga/Japan was built of burnt wood 1,300 years ago. In addition to this Unesco World Heritage Site, countless commercial and residential buildings as well as fences made of the inky black material with its delicate slate sheen can be found in the Land of the Rising Sun. In recent years, yakisugi or shou sugi ban, as the method is called in western Japan, has experienced a renaissance and is also increasingly being used in the West as a functional building material and characteristic stylistic element.
The wood is not actually burnt - rather, its surface is treated with fire to varying degrees of intensity and then oiled. The carbonisation makes the wood waterproof and keeps insects away.
For us, a small manufactory in the Mühlviertel region has dedicated itself to this technique - it took quite a bit of experimentation until it found the right temperature and burning time for our "charred woods". Because the material also has a lot to offer for interiors - in addition to the interesting look, which brings out the wood grain in many nuances of black, matt and glossy and allows the material to age particularly beautifully, burnt wood is far more resistant than untreated wood. Exactly the right aesthetics that we wanted to contrast with the historic materials of a workshop in Kitzbühel that had been converted into a lounge. The result is a look full of character and patina that tells stories about itself and its inhabitants.