The opening photograph shows the first Omotesando Wart Fair, held in August 2025. It is not a record of this year’s Ikejiri venue. Last year, tablecloths, flowers, and lighting shaped the gathering; this year’s official announcement updated that idea through an arrangement of numerous plants and stools. Flowers joined the human gathering last year. This year, plants themselves divided the places people occupied. The difference reveals the power of plants to alter space.
From Last Year’s Flowers to a Place Among Plants
WART brings food and music together around wine and art. DDAA also designed the first edition in 2025. According to official materials, it expanded the “table setting” for a good time at the table across the entire venue: cloth covered not only tables but sofas, beds, stepladders, and refrigerators, accompanied by flowers and tubular lighting. With no counter dividing sellers from guests, people pouring, drinking, and choosing music shared the same floor.
This year’s setting was a former gas station by Ikejiri-ōhashi Station, an interim site used for only about a month between closure and redevelopment. In the raw space opening broadly onto the intersection, DDAA placed numerous plants and scattered stools between them. Last year’s flowers held the eye near the table; this year, the plant arrangement itself shaped where people stood and how far apart they sat.
Here, plants are not the final decoration in an already finished room. They provide the first means of dividing space without walls. Different leaf widths and plant heights alter how people on the far side are seen. Even without marked aisles, people move around plants or choose stools between them. This is RareDex’s editorial reading of the published design, not a description pretending to be an on-site experience.
Opening to the City Beneath a Six-Meter Canopy
The gas-station canopy was a broad roof that kept rain off arriving and departing cars. For this event, tubular lighting hung from a ceiling approximately six meters high. In last year’s photographs, the slender luminous elements descended close to the floor, drawing vertical lines around tables. This year, plants and stools stood below them. Lighting that pulled the lofty ceiling toward human scale and plants rising from the floor outlined the now purposeless expanse from two directions.
DDAA is a design practice spanning architecture, urban planning, landscape, interiors, and products, with DDAA LAB for independent research and prototyping. The interest here lies in testing a way of inhabiting the site using only movable elements before permanent construction. Plants, stools, and lights do not close the lot like walls. They preserve its relationship with the intersection while creating reasons to stop inside.
The official information reviewed did not identify the plant varieties or the person responsible for planting. We therefore do not infer species from leaf shape or attribute the work to a particular planting designer. What matters is not the presence of rare plants, but how even unnamed plants take on a spatial function when placed between chairs and between people and the city.
Art and Sound Share the Same Floor
Scooters For Peace, a Harajuku gallery, staged a pop-up in the former service room. San Francisco-based Barry McGee contributed event artwork, while sound direction came from Nomizo, founder of the DJ collective CMYK. WART’s structure places art and sound alongside wine, food, and conversation rather than relegating them to the background.
On the final day, August 30, UKIYO of Yoyogi-Uehara served wine, with Sabasu of Akasaka and Massif of Ikejiri-ōhashi providing food. More than a vendor list, this shows how plants and stools supported a shared place even as the people and flavors changed each day. Across three days of changing hosts, the unmoving plant arrangement remained the venue’s framework.
Looking at the Arrangement on the Final Day
Ikejiri Wart Fair ran from 5:00 to 11:00 p.m. on August 30 at 3-15 Higashiyama, Meguro-ku, Tokyo. Admission was free. Drinking wine required a separate ¥2,500 glass purchase, while drinks and food inside were cash-on. The organizer’s official Instagram listed the schedule and each day’s participants. Availability was checked on the morning of August 30, but last-minute changes were possible, so visitors were advised to check the latest post before leaving.
The plant species are not the only thing to see. Notice which plants stand near stools, how much of the city remains visible beyond the leaves, and where the vertical lights approach the floor. One flower on a table and sitting among many plants create different distances between people and plants. The first concentrates attention on a tabletop; the second can change the direction of the body and the spacing between neighbors.
When bringing a plant into a room, we can consider more than filling an empty corner: what will happen beside that pot? Move a chair slightly, preserve a path, see the view beyond through leaves. The three days in Ikejiri offered an entry point for choosing plants not only for their isolated form, but for their power to rearrange relationships around them.