
I ran across an elegant noren on a recent visit to Seattle’s Asian Art Museum.
The noren is a traditional flat paneled Japanese curtain meant to hang across a doorway. It’s split down the center for easy passage.
One of the bedrooms upstairs is now the “tech room” that houses my partner’s mysterious inventory of things covered in pebbled black leatherette. The room is not a pit, but it’s no showpiece, either, and it has one of the best views in the house. Opening the window in hot weather is a key to keeping the place comfortable, and opening the door in any weather expands the sense of space in the upstairs hall.
For forty dollars, the museum’s noren looked like a good bet to improve ventilation and screen the electronic “back of the house”. That it did, and then some: I had forgotten that
noren are often used to separate a public room from a service area. That one carefully hand-dyed featherweight panel of bast finishes the tech room and communicates that it’s the way it is on purpose.
The noren is money well spent on a space that’s furnished with epoxy-coated high tech racks, shop lights, a salvaged office chair, and a two-stack of olive drab foot lockers.
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More after the jump.