OUR STORY
Giving forgotten things a new story.
We’re Tomoya and Cheryl, a Japanese–Australian couple living on Awaji Island, Japan.
Back in 2015, we were running our own fashion label in Tokyo. We loved making clothes, but we were gradually becoming exhausted by the business side of the fashion industry.
1. It All Began With a $1000 House
We decided to take a little break and go on a “detox holiday”. We packed an enormous amount of smoothies, fully intending to fast for the entire trip.
That didn’t last very long.
We got hungry and gave up almost immediately.
Somehow, during that same trip, we ended up buying an abandoned house on Awaji Island for just $1000.
The house was completely overgrown, filled with rubbish, badly damaged by termites and falling apart.
But to us, there was something strangely appealing about it.
We knew absolutely nothing about construction. We were curious about what was above the ceiling, so we pulled it down. We thought the floor was too high, so we ripped that out too.
And then we stopped.
We had no proper tools, no experience and absolutely no idea what to do next.
2. Learning As We Went
About six months after moving to Awaji Island, we bought another old house to live in and began learning how to renovate, little by little.
We installed an IKEA kitchen, laid new flooring and painted almost the entire house white.
At that point, we couldn’t even cut a piece of timber in a straight line.
Later, we bought our third house, which is where we live today.
The ground floor didn’t even have a floor — it was just bare earth. The bathroom was unfinished, and one room had been left with a piano and hundreds of empty beer cans.
It took us a year to finish renovating that house.
For the first time, we’d managed to complete an entire house ourselves, from beginning to end.
Somewhere along the way, we’d become completely absorbed in renovating old houses.
Eventually, we decided to close our fashion label.
3. Nehemiah, And Our First Guest
Our very first house, the one we’d bought for ¥100,000, was still sitting there untouched.
Then Cheryl’s dad suggested something.
“Why don’t you turn it into accommodation?”
With the help of a grant for renovating vacant houses, we began work in December 2019.
We had just three months to finish.
We quit our part-time jobs and spent almost every day working on the house from morning until night.
We argued. A lot.
By the end of June 2020, we’d finally finished.
But we’d never had much money saved, and by the time the renovation was complete, we didn’t have enough to pay the following month’s credit card bill.
We weren’t expecting many bookings, so we’d already started looking for part-time work again.
At the beginning of July, we listed nehemiah on Airbnb and went to bed.
The next morning, there was a booking.
Neither of us could believe it.
And then more bookings started coming in.
Guests began telling us that staying at nehemiah had helped them feel refreshed, that they’d found a sense of peace, or that they felt ready to face everyday life again.
That’s when we realised we’d created something more than just a place to sleep.
4. The House Nobody Wanted
We wanted to challenge ourselves again.
With our dog Chestnut, we walked around looking for abandoned houses, sometimes covering as much as ten kilometres in a day.
Then we remembered a house we’d looked at before, one that had been in such terrible condition we’d decided against buying it.
Until then, we’d mostly been searching for houses we could already imagine looking beautiful once renovated.
But what about the houses nobody wanted?
The ones that had been forgotten and left behind?
We wanted to find potential in those places.
To turn something that looked like rubbish into something worth treasuring.
And we wanted to face that challenge with God by our side.
And so, the house we bought for ¥200,000 became cornerstone — a name meaning a foundation or something on which everything else is built.
The renovation took a year and a half.
Without a doubt, it was the hardest challenge of our lives.
When we finally finished in January 2023, we were both so exhausted we barely had the energy to celebrate.
5. Finding Our Way Back To Clothes
We made a promise to ourselves.
Never again would we renovate another house.
And then we built a sauna, renovated nehemiah’s bathroom and even built a laundry room.
Apparently, we’re not very good at keeping that particular promise.
But somewhere along the way, we began to understand something about ourselves.
We loved imagining things, bringing ideas to life and attempting things we’d never done before.
Then we remembered something we’d dreamed about for years — opening our own clothing shop.
We came across an old house for sale for ¥1 million.
It was leaning to one side, filled with rubbish and didn’t even have running water.
But there was something about its earthen walls, tiled roof and little entrance gate that we loved.
We decided to buy it on the spot.
At first, we’d planned to turn it into a third holiday house. But after hearing concerns from a neighbour, we decided to put that plan on hold.
A few months later, we took another look at the house.
Up in the attic was a space with low wooden beams and beautiful old earthen walls.
And suddenly, we knew.
This was it.
And that’s how Atelier akiya began.
After years spent renovating houses, we were finding our way back to the world of clothes.
6. The Story Is Still Unfolding
Looking back, almost nothing has gone according to plan.
We’ve made mistakes, taken the long way around, run out of money and wondered more than once what on earth we were doing.
But through all those experiences, we’ve slowly begun to understand what it is we really want to do.
We never set out to become builders.
And we certainly weren’t buying houses as investments.
What we loved was imagining something, finding a way to bring it to life and challenging ourselves to do things we’d never done before.
We’re incredibly grateful to everyone who has stayed at our houses, supported us along the way or become part of our story in one way or another.
Our journey is still unfolding.
Tomoya, Cheryl & Chestnut