About
Objects for the home, and the inside of a life.
tk uchi. is a small shop Nina and I opened in Ashland, Oregon — a room of objects for the home, conscientiously curated, in alignment with the community we live in. It is something we have long talked about over kitchen tables and on long walks.
We are not trying to compete with the larger stores, or with the internet. We are making a smaller room, a place to walk into slowly, to handle a thing made by a person whose name we can tell you, to sit with a book, to talk to a neighbor.
Every object on the shelf has been chosen for a reason we can say out loud. Where we can, we work with makers in Southern Oregon and the broader Pacific Northwest. Where the right thing comes from further away — a scent from Iceland that journeys like the weather, or an objet d'art from Japan that is simply pure and beautiful — we have looked carefully at how it is made, and by whom.
The shop is named for the Japanese word uchi: the inside of a home, and the people kept in it. Everything here is chosen with that room in mind, and with the larger room of Ashland — our neighborhood, the families who walk past on their way to the park.
Four principles
Few, careful, kept. A short list, refreshed slowly, moving through the seasons.
Named makers, always. Every maker here is one we can point to — a person or a small studio, a material we can explain, a thing built to be kept.
Things for rooms, not displays. We buy for the table you eat at, the chair you sit in. Not the photograph of the room — the room itself.
Small, on purpose. One door. The discipline is the point, and the welcome.
Traci Keen, proprietor.
Ashland, Oregon.