SMALL, AND GENEROUS

The first thing she does in any new room is put things on the walls. Small works by artists she admires. ”I've collected small pieces from artists I like and stick them on my temporary walls," she says, "accompanied by photos of friends and family." The pieces are up momentarily and she knows it; their fleeting appearance from one wall to another is the point. Home, for Aya Mura, has never been the room. It is what she brings to it.

She left her Melbourne apartment three months ago and has been moving between cities since, which makes her, at the moment, a person without a home writing about the meaning of home. This week she and her partner move into a house on the outskirts of Tokyo. "I value time in my own space," she says, "surrounded by my favourite things, at home with my favourite people." In the meantime she has been practising the thing she believes: that a home is something you do, not somewhere you are. "I've found my ways of feeling at home away from home."

The conviction is inherited, and it has an address. Aya grew up between a family house in Sydney and her grandparents' place in a suburban pocket of Kyoto, a neighbourhood, she says fondly, that a local might write off as full of yankees, the Japanese word for a certain loveable kind of delinquent. "I defend it as home to people I love." The house is a decent size by Kyoto standards, but the family never spreads out into it. They fold into the small living room instead, too many of them and half of them too tall, her brother and father"risk banging their heads on every doorway." That room is the origin of everything she now makes. "A small space filled with soul," she says, "is better than a large one without it."

It is an easy sentiment to admire and a harder one to consider honestly, because the two cultures she moves between do not mean the same thing when they say small. In Japan, small is inheritance, centuries of compact living refined into a discipline, an aesthetic, almost a grammar of space. In Australia, small is a recent and reluctant arrival, pressed on people by a housing crisis, still shadowed by the quarter-acre dream it displaced. On one side of the water a modest room is ordinary, sometimes even noble. On the other, it can still read as failure.

Aya sits on that seam, perfectly balanced between both contexts. "A lot of creativity can come from constraint," she says, "and that's what makes me enjoy working with a small space. For me, it's a challenge I have fun with. So it feels more like a choice rather than something I've been forced into." Then, without prompting, the honest coda: "Even if that's also true." She knows the difference between choosing less and being left with less. What troubles her is not small living but the people denied a decent version of it, one that looks like having no ”access to a space to live that supports wellbeing, and no time to put in the work needed to make the most of a smaller space." She points to Never Too Small, the Melbourne channel now watched around the world, and to developers like Neometro, as proof that little space and a good life are not opposites. She would like that proof to be available to everyone. "I feel hopeful," she says, and means it.

If Australia and Japan arrive at smallness from opposite directions, what they share is stranger: a longing for each other. "In Australia I've noticed how popular Japanese design is," Aya says, "and in Japan, how popular Western design is." Each culture romanticises precisely what the other is trying to leave behind, Australians reaching for Japanese calm, Japanese reaching for Western abundance, and something is lost in the exchange. "It makes me sad to see culture and tradition becoming diluted, and I don't want to play a role in that." This is the risk that shadows her whole field: that Japanese design thins into a mood, minimalism as a wall colour, cut loose from the constraints and the beliefs that produced it.

Her answer is not to choose a side but to refuse the flattening. "The reality of my background is that I have one foot in each culture. I'd like to use that as a strength." She can see each from the outside and belong to each from within, "understand each as an insider,” and she means to spend that doubleness carefully: "to encourage young people like me in Japan to recognise the importance of maintaining tradition, culture and craftsmanship." The distinction she keeps returning to is the one between borrowing a look and inheriting a discipline. Anyone can buy the look. The discipline has to be preserved.

You can see the discipline in the furniture. Years ago, newly arrived in Melbourne, one of the first things she did was fix cheap vinyl shelves to the wall with command strips, just deep enough to stand a book face-out, so that her copies of Apartamento and her landscape and architecture titles seemed to float. "It was a way of keeping the ideas within these books open and floating around my space," she says; the books began to "function almost like art." She liked the effect and disliked the vinyl. The result, eventually, was the In the Clouds Floating Bookshelf, made with the Copenhagen studio 91-92, Zeyu and Weibo, whom she'd found years earlier while travelling Europe to interview designers about circularity. What drew her was their refusal to choose between beauty and conscience: "they create products out of recycled plastic and find a way to make these products beautiful, despite the constraints of the material." She had wanted, for a long time, to "prove that we can have beautiful design that also aligns with our values."

That instinct predates the furniture. Before any of it, Aya was Australia's Country Coordinator for Fashion Revolution, a role she set her sights on as a student and stepped into after graduating. She left a couple of years ago but kept the thinking, which turns out to be the same thinking underneath the shelves and the small rooms: that living in line with your values "isn't only better for the environment and for other people, but makes me feel more fulfilled, and allows me to meet and work with values-aligned people." Ethics, for her, is not a tax on pleasure. It is where the pleasure comes from.

All of it converges on a single idea, and it is here that her two cultures finally dovetail rather than diverge. Asked to respond to MUJI's brief New Life, Organised, she took organised to mean something other than tidy. "To me, an organised space is one that values negative space," she says, "and in the process frees space in your mind, to daydream, learn, read, watch, talk, without feeling cluttered." Japan has a word for that emptiness, ma, the charged interval, the pause that gives everything around it meaning, and it is telling that a Japanese company had to set the brief for a woman of two homes to answer it in both languages at once. Negative space is not absence but room to think.

Ask her what a new life, organised, looks like for her right now, and the answer is disarmingly plain: "creating a new home base to work from." She is looking forward to showing us what it becomes.

For now she is between walls, a few borrowed pictures held up with blu-tack, a city still to unpack into. It is, when you think about it, the most complete statement of her argument she could make. The home was never the house. It was the things she carried, the care she took putting them up, and the values she would not leave behind.

You can see more of Aya Mura's work on her website or Instagram. Photography by Aya Mura. Words by Tiffany Jade.