Art Atelier du Travail: Taking on Leathercraft in Nakameguro

Art Atelier du Travail in Nakameguro, Tokyo, connects leathercraft enthusiasts with something deeper than a stitch.

The storefront of Art Atelier du Travail, an Arts and Leather Craft workshop, tucked into a quiet residential pocket of Nakameguro.

I traded the New York City heat for the staggering Tokyo humidity, on a hot June day. Excited to meet a Japanese leather craft artisan, I made my way to the residential part of Nakameguro, a trendy neighborhood of Tokyo, to meet Ryo the artisan and his wife Aya, owners of Art Atelier du Travail. It is a specialized leathercraft boutique and workshop popular with travelers eager to learn a new skill. As I have been making leather accessories and now handbags for a few years now, I was naturally drown to Art Atelier du Travail.

The studio is small, lived in and well appointed with an efficient layout that allows it to hold multiple sewing machines, leather knives, crafting tools, full leather hides, threads, finished products, scraps, spools. A full-fledged version of my much smaller leather working space in New York. Ryo and Aya made me feel at ease instantly, greeting me with warm smiles as they set up my work session to start with the workshop. 

A grid display inside the atelier showcasing bespoke leather footwear and structured bags, including a traditional tan randoseru backpack.

Ryo started Art Atelier du Travail 10 years after a career at leather ateliers. The objet du jour is a small baseball pouch with intricate red stitching. The leather selected by Ryo is Tochigi leather, a tannery that specializes in full-vegetable tanned leather from the mountain region where Ryo is from. Art Atelier du Travail is one of many leather craft workshops in Japan. The country has a long-standing history and culture of leather craft dating back 1,500 years, from samurai armor to civilian luxury.

A structured baseball pouch in progress, featuring a clean diagonal baseball stitch pulled taut across vegetable-tanned Tochigi leather.

As I learn the baseball stitch, an alternating diagonal stitch that crisscrosses over the two leather edges, we bond over commonalities (the three of us all worked at McDonald's when we were younger), our respective culture, living in the United States, Japan, France, West Africa food. As time passes, learning the baseball stitch is the least interesting of the workshop, sharing the moment and bonding through the craft is the real reward.

Co-founders Ryo and Aya at their main workbench, framed by an efficient inventory of drafting manuals and leather craft tools.

The true purpose of the atelier feels like it is to build a space where people from opposite sides of the world can instantly feel at home and learn from each other. As Ryo noted as we packed up my new baseball patch, the craft is simply the vehicle; the connection is the destination.

Putting the technical sequence into practice under the eyes of the studio masters.