In 2020, Schemata Architects reimagined a 1985 Japanese sento, or public bathhouse, into a Towada-clad destination complete with DJ booth and cafe. Last year, founder Jo Nagasaka and his team looked back to the history of the sento—and toward the future of a vacant lot nearby—when refreshing an extant bathhouse on the ground floor of a reinforced-concrete building in the Komae suburbs of Tokyo.

Traditionally, sento partition walls separated zones for men and women. Here, one rises some 7 feet high, not quite to the ceiling of the 1,000-square-foot bathhouse, carving out zones for saunas but also a bandai, or reception counter, where everyone can relax together over a beer. Postwar sento also boasted murals of Mount Fuji, a custom carried into the present via tile patchworks arranged in honor of the murals Nagasaka remembered from the Kyoto bathhouses he used to frequent.

Those tiles, custom made in Tajimi in three shapes and sizes, clad the surfaces of the bathing areas for installations that incorporate the usual grids, but also patterns of negative space that give a sense of time passing. Their hue references the greenery of the lot next door, where plants sprout up to feed off the bathhouse culverts. With this humble yet impactful project, Schemata has updated the old sento into a breezy 21st-century hangout.