To celebrate its 30^th anniversary, WADA Sports is moving to a newly built headquarter and main retail shop. The new building is also a studio for Wada Bari technology, the brand’s original racket stringing technology.

The interior of the shop has a gigantic elliptical metallic structure supporting the building. This design seizes the structure to turn it into a huge fixture for the rackets.

Below the elliptical structure, the racket products are aligned in an originally designed fixture. The rackets are arranged in series and made easy to pick up one by one to feel the difference of touch, thickness, and weight.

Above, the elliptical shape is used as a display of various valuable rackets collected from all over the country; wooden vintage rackets, rackets used by famous players, and even rackets that was miraculously saved during the great Tohoku earthquake in 2011. This collection of valuable rackets transforms the shop’s interior to look like a museum of rackets.

This new building is not only celebrating the 30 years of WADA Sports history, but it also is a modern Noah’s Ark transmitting the culture of racket sports to the next generations.

Data sheet

Project Name: The Racket Submarine

Project Identification: WADA Sports, Flagship Store.

Client: WADA Sports

Location: Himeji City, Japan.

Address: Sakanoue 102-3 Aboshi, 671-1223 Himeji, Japan

End of construction work: Sept13th 2017

Duration of construction work: 5months

Total Floor area: 412sqm

Design Company: Matsuya Art Works / KTX archiLAB.

Head Architect Designer: Tetsuya Matsumoto

Photo Credit: © Stirling Elmendorf

About Matsuya Art Works / KTX archiLAB

Established in 1976, Matsuya-Art-Works is a four decades company acting in the architecture, design and construction industries. The company has a wide range of building types in the portfolio, though specialized in commercial projects.

Matsuya-Art-Works conducts projects according to the client’s business strategy and materializes it into an interior space or a completed building. Its projects go beyond the reception of the finalized space to guarantee a good functioning of the business.

The KTX archiLAB was founded in 2006 to sustain this activity by producing high quality designs. The Japanese based company has received numerous local and international awards for its projects conducted both in Japan and foreign countries. 

List of Awards in 2017

• American Architecture Prize (USA)
• IIDA Best of Asia Pacific Design Award (USA)
• LIXIL Store Front Contest GOLD AWARD (Japan)
• IDEA International Design Award FINALIST (USA)
• Red Dot Design Award (Germany)
• ICONIC Awards WINNER (Germany)
• The Plan Award FINALIST (Italy)
• A’ Design Awards PLATINUM AWARD (Italy)
• A’ Design Awards GOLD AWARD (Italy)
• A’ Design Awards SILVER AWARD (Italy)
• Nikkei Newspaper Shop Design Awards EXCELLENCE AWARD (Japan)