The Apartment I Would Absolutely Steal

There are places that make me jealous for boring reasons—clean lines, high ceilings, a beautiful occupant. And then there’s Yasumasa Yonehara’s apartment in Tokyo, which makes me want to manufacture false pretenses, evict the man before he realizes what’s happening, and install myself among his things permanently.

The Selby paid a visit recently, doing their quiet crawl through someone else’s private world. Yonehara is a photographer and blogger whose work leans heavily toward semi-naked, wide-eyed Japanese girls—arresting, vivid, slightly unreal. His apartment is the natural interior of that sensibility: neon sneakers stacked in unlikely configurations, rare action figures fighting for shelf space, SpongeBob watching over all of it from a dozen different angles in what Tokyo generously describes as a living room.

It’s the paradise a teenage boy would design if money and taste arrived at the same moment—or, more accurately, the paradise a grown adult designs when he decides to stop pretending he’s moved on from that phase. The place overflows with curiosities, caps, and photographs of undressed Nanamis and Ayumis. I’ve already mentally arranged my things around his.

His blog is worth a look while I work out the logistics of a hostile relocation. My Japanese stops well short of fluent, but picture books were always my preferred format anyway, and Yonehara makes exceptionally good ones.