Form Follows Feelings: Devon Turnbull and Karimoku Craft Wooden Speakers That Stir the Soul.

Karimoku Research—the experimental arm of one of Japan’s most respected furniture makers—has just opened its third Survey exhibition in Tokyo’s Nishiazabu district. It’s a collaboration that sits right at the intersection of sound, craft, and spatial design.

Titled Between Space & Sound「間の音」(Ma no Oto), the exhibition pairs Karimoku Furniture with New York and Tokyo-based audio designer Devon Turnbull, founder of OJAS—a name you might know from his handcrafted hi-fi speaker systems installed everywhere from Supreme stores and Public Records in Brooklyn to exhibitions at SFMOMA and the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum.

The central question driving the project is a good one: What is function, and how does it relate to feeling? Working together since 2025, Turnbull visited the Karimoku factory in Aichi, where his intricate speaker designs were translated into complex wooden curvatures through 3D-machining and hand-applied veneering techniques. Where OJAS speakers have historically been built from plywood, this collaboration pushes into oak veneer finished in either Turnbull’s signature Pewter Gray or Karimoku’s Pure Oak—both allowing the natural grain to stay visible.

The exhibition unfolds across all three floors of the Karimoku Research Centre. The first floor features a tea room-inspired Sound House wrapped in Turnbull’s half-tone pattern, housing a pair of medium-sized Rokujo speakers for meditative listening. The second floor opens up into a communal space centred around massive Multicell Horn Speakers—Turnbull’s curved horn designs, typically realised in metal, rendered entirely in wood for the first time. The basement showcases the full collection of three speaker models—the Sanjo, Rokujo, and Nurikabe—alongside modular seating and folding acoustic panels inspired by traditional byōbu screens.

What anchors the whole thing is the Japanese concept of Ma「間」—the tension and harmony that exist in the spaces between things. Sound, after all, requires space to travel through before we feel it. That philosophical thread weaves neatly through every floor, every piece, every pause between notes.

The exhibition runs until 5th June 2026 at the Karimoku Research Centre, 2-24-2 Nishiazabu, Minato-ku, Tokyo.

Playful and Purposeful: ESM Studio in Redfern by Olivia Bossy.

With an aura of unpredictability and calm, this three-part space champions playful shapes and layouts, with a clear purpose to each design detail. Sound indulgence and immersion are cleverly brought forth into another dimension.

[Images courtesy of Karimoku Research. Photography by Masaaki Inoue.]