Turning My Home into Komeda

—Wouldn't it be amazing if your home became Komeda?

Hmm...

I started working from home this year, but I'm not making any progress at all. I think it's probably because the environment is bad.

You might have thought, 'Don't blame your own laziness on your environment!', but please lower that raised fist and put it back in your pocket. See, you feel strangely calm now, don't you?

I have a solid reason for making this claim. After all, I am productive at Komeda (Komeda's Coffee).

Actually, last year, I loved Komeda so much that I moved into an apartment a 5-minute walk away from it.

Since then, without exaggeration, I've been going there four days a week. Sometimes I go for breakfast, work a little at home, and then go back to Komeda in the evening. Two Komedas a day.

So, I could just work at Komeda all the time, but there are signs saying '90-minute limit during busy hours,' and there are documents I can't take out of my house, so life doesn't always go as planned.

Is there, like, some way to make this work...?

Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.

Hmmmmmmmmmmmm.

Hmmmmm.

Hmm.

Yeah.

I see.

I should just turn my home into Komeda.

And so,I made a Komeda at home.

By the way, I naturally applied for the Ouchi Komeda Set Giveaway Campaign that was held in July 2023, but looking at past examples, the odds are extremely high, at the level of "one in tens of thousands." I didn't feel like I would win.

Speaking of Komeda, it's the red sofa.

To create a Komeda, let's first break down what Komeda is. Komeda can be broadly divided into three elements.

They are red sofas, a relaxing interior, and spacious tables.

If you have these, it is undoubtedly Komeda. It's the same as how if you have "sunglasses," "slicked-back hair," and "mysterious foreign language," it is undoubtedly Tamori.

To assemble these three elements, I will start by making the red sofa.

I thought about taking this opportunity to buy a new sofa, but sofas are, well, extremely expensive. They easily cost in the hundreds of thousands of yen, so I gave up immediately.

So, as a way to make effective use of the sofa I have now, I thought of putting a red cover on it.

I visited several craft stores in search of red fabric, but I couldn't find Komeda-like fabric. It was a series of "this isn't it."

After searching endlessly, I finally went as far as Nippori.

The Nippori Fabric Town is famous for being able to get fabric cheaply, and it was quite crowded that day too. Fabric that was sold for 150 yen per 10cm at a local craft store could be bought for 100 yen per meter in Nippori. Look closely. 10cm and 1m. The units are different. It's 10 times, 10 times!

If you come to the fabric district, you should basically be able to find any fabric. However, I don't know the name of the Komeda-like fabric, so I don't even know which section to look in.

The large stores were divided into separate buildings like 'Building XX' and 'Building XX', so I couldn't find them even by searching aimlessly. After wandering around the textile district for about an hour, I finally asked a shop clerk.

'Um, I'm looking for fabric like the kind Komeda uses...'

Fortunately, the clerk was kind, so I was spared from being asked, 'Huh?'

They didn't have the exact same thing, but they advised me that red corduroy might be close, so I bought that. While regular fabric can be bought for 100 yen per meter, this special fabric cost 1,500 yen per meter. Seriously?

The high price of the corduroy fabric made me dizzy, so I quickly gave up on making everything out of the same cloth. I'll use corduroy only for the seat and backrest, and fake the rest with cheap satin.

I was able to buy the satin fabric for 100 yen per meter. It was so cheap that even though 2 meters was actually enough, for some reason I bought 5 meters. I have a huge amount left over at home.

I didn't know how to make a sofa cover, and when I looked it up, all I found was that it was 'impossible,' so I decided to ignore all of that and proceed by intuition. I don't have a sewing machine. And I don't have the patience.

I draped fabric that I had roughly sized over the sofa body and used fabric glue to stick it down so it would look like a cover. I made it so only the back cushion could be secured with elastic like a pillowcase, but everything else was just stuck on with glue.

I'm changing all the walls. Even though it's a rental.

The next thing I tackled was a 'relaxing interior'.

Since Komeda is a chain, there are slight differences depending on the store, but they all share a wood-based interior. Other than that, there's brick or white wallpaper.

Making the wallpaper Komeda-style was the easiest of the three elements I gathered this time.

As for the process,first, set up the pillars.

The sheets alone would have been fine, but thanks to the pillars, it gained a three-dimensional feel that canceled out the cheapness of a DIY project.

I realized that using only wood-grain sheets made it look strangely flat due to the repetitive pattern, so I bought some brick-pattern ones halfway through. Because of that, I have a huge amount of wood-grain sheets left over.

If anyone knows of a craft I can make with just wood-grain sheets and red fabric, please let me know.

I don't have a car, so I made five round trips to the home improvement store pulling a hand truck. Of course, it was midsummer and incredibly hot. I desperately hauled the luggage while losing more moisture from my body than I could call sweat—it was more like juice.

The wind was strong that day, and it was really tough because the plastic cardboard kept almost blowing away. I desperately carried it home while thinking, 'If I hit someone, will it start a fight? Can plastic cardboard act as a shield?' Thin plastic cardboard doesn't look like it could withstand a single punch. Defense +1, Agility -36.

I bought the longest 1-foot lumber available at the home improvement store, but it still didn't reach the ceiling. I thought about giving up and writing an article titled 'I turned my living room into a material storage area,' but after some trial and error, I finally managed to make it work.

Maybe I do have patience after all.

Commercial-grade tables are too heavy.

Why is it that work goes so well at Komeda? There are various reasons one could think of, such as the calm atmosphere or the food that provides energy and motivation, but the fact that the tables are large is an essential factor.

Komeda's tables are thick and reliable, unlike those round tables that reach their limit just by having two glasses of water placed on them. Even with a laptop, a miso katsu sandwich, and an Azuki Komachi Aoi on it, there is still plenty of room to spare.

There is as much difference between a typical cafe table and a Komeda table as there is between a Kokiri Sword and a Dragon Slayer.

I wanted a thick, wide table, but buying one would cost hundreds of thousands of yen, so I decided to give up on that and make use of what I already have. I figured I could just attach cafe table legs to the Nitori table I use in the living room.

I ordered something as close to Komeda's as possible online. According to the product page, these table legs weigh 15kg. That's the weight of three cats. I hope they get along well.

All that's left is to attach the existing tabletop to this, but... how exactly am I supposed to attach a tabletop?

When I ordered it, I thought, 'I'll just screw it in with a drill and be done with it,' but now that I've actually stacked them, I can intuitively tell that using screws would just rip it apart. If a drill could solve it, I wouldn't need welding.

In the end, I managed to solve it by forcibly changing the position of the metal fittings originally on the tabletop and connecting them to the table legs. An expert might say, 'That's not a solution,' but it's too late now. I wish experts would contact me before I write an article.

Well, once the table was ready, another problem arose. The height of the sofa and the table didn't match.

I bought longer legs to raise the sofa to match the table, but then the screw sizes didn't match. I had measured carefully and confirmed they were 8mm in diameter, but they were actually 10mm.

I went back and forth to the home improvement store while thinking of a solution, and eventually, I modified the sofa by attaching new metal fittings so I could force the long legs on.

Even though I had planned everything meticulously, it didn't go as planned at all once I started, and having to deal with things on the fly while carrying out the 'crime' feels very much like a mystery novel. I feel like I could pull off the perfect crime right now.

Komeda has arrived at my home!

Well, I have now gathered everything that makes up a Komeda: red sofas, relaxing interior, and spacious tables.

My very own Komeda is here, right now.

If I showed this photo to someone who didn't know any better and asked, "Where do you think this is?", I bet they'd answer, "Komeda." And yet, this is my house.

I bought the glasses sold on the official online store, and I also prepared paper coasters and beans. The beans were sold at a nearby store for 1,000 yen for a set of 100. When I bought them, I thought, "100 is so many," but before I knew it, I kept reaching for them, so it's not nearly enough. Maybe I should buy the 10,000 yen set of 1,000 next time.

A home Komeda is free. You can do whatever you want. There's no need to worry about someone saying, "Ah!! Customer!! That's not allowed!! Ah!!" even if you let your cat sit there.

There's no 90-minute time limit either. You can stay for 9 hours or even 9 days. After all, it's my own home.

The greatest environment in human history, "Komeda at home," is finally complete.

The end

I'm extremely satisfied with the result. The view is almost identical to being at Komeda, so if I play some cafe background noise from YouTube, the environment will be exactly the same.

With this, I should be able to get a lot of work done at home.

#MadeIt #TriedIt