Anyi

A furniture set shaped by the rituals of Chengdu tea houses

In Chengdu, tea houses aren’t just places to drink tea — they’re social spaces where people slow down, gather, watch traditional performances, and play mahjong for hours. Anyi takes that culture as its starting point, translating its relaxed rhythm, material language, and communal spirit into a contemporary mahjong table and chair set.

The name Anyi comes from the Sichuanese expression 安逸: ease, comfort, and the pleasure of unhurried gathering. Rather than solving a design problem, this project asks how furniture can carry cultural memory through form, material, and craft.

The design began with the culture around mahjong, not the game alone

Five references shaped the project — the city, the ritual, the game, the materials, and the craft tradition. Together they form a layered system: Chengdu sets the emotional atmosphere; tea culture and mahjong define the ritual being designed for; bamboo, ceramic, and lacquerware supply the material vocabulary.

Chengdu

Known for its laid-back lifestyle, teahouse culture, and Sichuanese opera. The city’s sense of ease became the emotional foundation — the feeling the furniture should carry, not just the setting it references.

Tea culture

Chengdu tea houses are communal spaces for long, unhurried gatherings. The project uses the tea house as a cultural scene rather than treating the furniture as isolated objects.

Mahjong

More than a game — a social ritual built around a shared table. Designing for mahjong meant designing for hours of seated play, for four people gathering together, for the texture of tiles on a surface.

Bamboo and ceramic

Selected because they’re native to the tea house environment. Bamboo references traditional Chengdu tea house chairs; ceramic comes from the Gaiwan tea vessel. Both carry cultural memory without needing decorative motifs to do it.

Chengdu lacquerware

The table’s deep red finish references Chengdu lacquerware — a historic craft tradition known for its rich color and refined surface. The glossy finish was deliberate: in Chinese craft culture, lacquerware’s reflective surface reads as elevated and ceremonial, while keeping the form itself clean.

Exploring a contemporary language for the Chengdu tea house

Early sketches explored how traditional tea house furniture could be reinterpreted as a contemporary mahjong set — looking at bamboo chair structures, rounded ceramic forms, and table proportions.

The central tension was between cultural legibility and contemporary form. Directions that borrowed too directly felt like replicas; directions that moved too far lost their grounding. The resolution was to focus on construction logic rather than surface ornament — keeping the posture, joinery, and material behavior of traditional forms while stripping away decorative detail.

Chair

Chinese cosmology shaped the chair’s three-part structure

The chair draws from the cosmological structure of the Gaiwan tea vessel — sky, people, and ground — translated into back (sky), seat (people), and legs (ground). The structure gives the chair symbolic organization while keeping the form simple. It also creates a quiet visual echo between the object you sit in and the object you drink from.

Traditional Chengdu bamboo chairs informed the chair’s posture

The outward-splayed legs, low cross-rung detail, and lightweight structure of traditional Chengdu bamboo chairs informed the overall posture. Rather than reproducing the traditional chair, the construction logic was adapted into a cleaner, more contemporary silhouette — familiar in spirit, new in form.

Bamboo becomes both structure and craft surface

Frictional fit joinery keeps the construction language consistent

The legs are joined using frictional fit — a bamboo joinery method without visible hardware or adhesive. Beyond material consistency, it has a functional benefit: the joint can be disassembled and reassembled without degrading the structure. The nodes where legs meet rungs become a visible design detail rather than something hidden.

Table

The table surface frames the play space

The lacquerware-inspired finish adds Chengdu’s craft identity

The deep red glossy finish references Chengdu lacquerware. Gloss over matte was deliberate — lacquerware’s cultural identity lives in its reflective surface. A matte finish would have softened that signal.

A contemporary mahjong set rooted in ease, gathering, and material culture

Seen together, the chair and table reinforce each other: the warm, woven bamboo of the chair sits against the lacquered red of the table base; the lightness of the seating is offset by the weight and ceremony of the table. The set carries the feeling of anyi — ease, comfort, and the pleasure of gathering — not through quotation, but through material memory.

This project taught me that translating culture into form is different from referencing it. Referencing is decorative — you borrow a motif or a surface pattern. Translating is structural: you understand why something was made the way it was, and carry that reasoning into new decisions. The frictional fit joinery, the cosmological structure of the chair, the gloss of the lacquerware finish — none of these are ornamental borrowings. They’re the cultural logic of the original objects showing up in new ones.

The hardest constraint was holding cultural legibility and contemporary form in tension at the same time. Anyi sits closer to contemporary in its silhouette, but the material decisions carry enough memory that it doesn’t feel decontextualized.