Japanese bathroom brand Toto will open its summer exhibition Technology Meets Tradition, at its Clerkenwell showroom, in London, from May 20-31, 2024.

The exhibition includes the installation of a Zen garden, alongside a  Tea House, with a collection of products using ancient techniques in a contemporary context.

Toto will showcase its latest luxury integrated Washlet toilet – Neorest WX – launched at ISH2023, alongside its Flotation bath tub, in the surroundings of a Japanese zen garden

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Commissioned to create the zen garden, landscape specialist Emi Morita trained as an architect and apprenticed for five years under Japanese garden and tea garden designer Hidefumi Nagato in Hiroshima, Japan,.

Morita has also been in charge of pruning and managing the bonsai collection in the Japanese garden of the Moscow Academy Botanical Garden.

Zen gardens, also known as Japanese rock gardens, are renowned for their simplicity, tranquillity, and connection to nature with rocks, gravel, sand, and plants often in symbolic arrangements.

Complementing Toto’s Zen garden installation, Squire & Partners has designed a tea house or Chashitsu on the lower ground floor of the showroom,

Characterised by minimalist aesthetics, tatami mat flooring, sliding paper doors (shoji) and natural materials such as wood and bamboo, Squire & Partners team has reimagined the structure using materials from the Cipango collective of Japanese arts & crafts studio.

Cipango is a social enterprise that matches architects and design professionals in the building, design and luxury industries with select artisans from Kyoto and other handcraft-rich regions.

The tea house is conceived beyond an outer and inner ‘roji’ – a layered tea garden passed through to reach a tea house – with visitors arriving through the rock garden at the showroom’s entrance and moving through a gallery of crafted materials by Japanese artisans, curated by Cipango.