Not the house, but the feeling of it you carry inside.
I started making cakes at thirteen. Encouraged to work early, I built a little cake company alongside high school, opened a cake shop when I graduated, then moved into a professional kitchen and started a catering company. I have always loved working, the fulfilment of it, as long as it stays creative.
But somewhere in the repetition, the same days on a loop, that part quietly went out.
A holiday abroad became a year I hadn't planned.
For the first time I had the empty hours to think through what I actually wanted, the way you do in your early twenties when nothing is decided yet. I filled the mornings with my matcha routine, a quiet obsession since I first tried it at twelve in Japan. The stillness of my mornings cleared something the kitchen had flattened, and, as I tend to do, I turned an obsession into my work.
Matcha carries a ceremony centuries old:
a few slow minutes that are yours, a routine you look forward to, made the way it has always been made in Japan. We live faster now, and rituals like that are the first thing the day gives up. The question that became Uchi was how to keep those minutes, and then a more interesting one: how to combine them with the physical beauty we've come to value so much, so the ritual isn't hidden in a cupboard but kept in plain sight, something you're glad to look at.
Answering both at once is where the system came from. I started with the object and worked backwards, from how it sits on a counter to what goes inside it. The stainless steel 'Base', made to stay, an object earning its place in your home the way good furniture does. A Pod of aluminium, filled with matcha, made to be recycled and reordered.
The word 'system' is deliberate. You keep the Base for good. The Pod returns to the loop, aluminium recycled without loss, again and again. And the same thinking runs the length of the brand: packaging that goes back into the cycle it came from, considered shipping, one producer, held to one standard. Not a product with a refill, but a closed loop.
from the counter to the bin to the field.
The matcha is the reason for the object, never an afterthought to it.
Uchi works with one producer: Horii Shichimeien, a tea house in Uji founded in 1879. Their tea master composes Kaze no Shiro from first-flush tencha across Kyoto, Nara and Shiga — a blend in the Uji tradition, stone-milled at forty grams an hour.
Uchi (うち) is the Japanese word for home — not the house, but the feeling of it you carry inside.
Its mark, a small red square, is drawn from the old square houses of Japan: the ritual respected, given a form that belongs where you already live.
I won't pretend the building has been effortless. I spent years working with my hands; now most of my day is a laptop and software I'm still learning. I'm not good at all of it yet, and learning daily. I feel grateful every day that I get to call this my work.
Because Uchi was never really about matcha.
It's about the few minutes a day that belong to no one but you, the ones that make anywhere feel like home.
