Bespoke Furniture Influenced by Japanese Tea Rooms and Ettore Sottsass
Who? Shin Okuda, founder of furniture and design studio Waka Waka, hails from Japan, but moved to Los Angeles 20 years ago. "I had been offered a strange and strange job in Arizona," he explains. "It was as a travel agent, back then, there were a lot of Japanese businessmen who went to Scottsdale to play golf, so I was only looking after the golfers, I stayed in Arizona for two months and then I moved to Los Angeles to see how things would go. " Then, from 2003, Okuda found a job making sculptures for fine artists. "I worked in different art studios for some years, in 2009 I started doing my own things, but it was not sculpture, I started making furniture". That same year, Okuda met his wife Kristin Dickson, who had just opened a commercial space on Sunset Boulevard called Iko Iko. "When it opened, I went to see the store and I made friends with it, and then I started making furniture for its events, people started getting intere...