Devon Turnbull and Karimoku Launch 'Oto no Kagu': Listening-Room Furniture From a $2,070 Chair to Byobu Acoustic Panels

Karimoku Furniture, one of Japan's largest wood furniture makers, has launched a new brand designed by Devon Turnbull — the New York- and Tokyo-based audio designer behind the OJAS loudspeaker brand. It is called 音の家具 By OJAS and Karimoku Furniture, romanised by the company itself as "Oto no Kagu" (a literal gloss would be "furniture of sound"; Karimoku has not published an official English name). The 15-piece launch collection goes on sale at Karimoku dealers across Japan on Thursday 22 October 2026, as reported by PHILE WEB. No availability outside Japan has been announced.

The premise is unusual enough to be worth spelling out: this is not audio-adjacent furniture styled to look like hi-fi. It is furniture whose shapes were reverse-engineered out of a loudspeaker cabinet, by a person who builds loudspeaker cabinets for a living.

From speaker cabinet to chair

The origin story Karimoku tells starts with a chair Turnbull made for his 2021 exhibition "Not For Sale" at 909 Gallery. He took an OJAS speaker enclosure and broke it down into its constituent ideas — proportion, material, structure, geometry — then reassembled those ideas as a seat. The panels that would have formed the cabinet walls became the seat and the back.

That object was later developed into Chair 001 during KARIMOKU RESEARCH's "Survey 03: FORM FOLLOWS FEELINGS" project, which ran from February to June 2026. From there the single chair expanded into a system: modular seating with or without arms, bench units that join the modules together, a floor chair and low table proportioned for tatami rooms, equipment shelving, and free-standing acoustic panels.

Readers who followed Turnbull's Tokyo exhibition earlier this year will recognise the vocabulary. The "Between Space & Sound" (Ma no Oto) show at the Karimoku Research Centre in Nishiazabu, covered in English by Yellowtrace, built a tea-room-like "Sound House" listening room around OJAS speakers in oak veneer — a departure from the plywood OJAS has typically used — along with modular seating and byobu-inspired folding acoustic panels. Oto no Kagu is that research turned into a catalogue.

Shelving sized for turntables and valve amps

The piece most likely to catch a hi-fi reader's eye is Shelving 001. Karimoku says it is designed to carry turntables and valve amplifiers, at a shelf height that accommodates LP records and with enough structural strength to take stacked weight. The oak version measures W1778 × D460 × H473mm and is priced at about $2,720 (¥429,550, tax included).

Chair 001 in oak (nara) measures W540 × D740 × H630mm and costs about $2,070 (¥327,800, tax included).

Then there is the Acoustic Panel OJ1, a free-standing absorber whose form and function Karimoku traces directly to the byobu folding screen. The company describes two uses: standing it near a wall to cut reflections, or placing it across a larger space to carve out a dedicated listening area. The oak version is W1900 × D313 × H1800mm and is priced at about $4,810 (¥760,100, tax included) for a set of two panels. Karimoku has not published any absorption coefficients or other acoustic performance figures, so what the panel actually does to a room is, for now, a matter of its maker's description rather than measurement.

Everything comes in two finishes: Pure Oak, and Pewter Gray — Turnbull's signature colour, newly mixed for this project so that the oak grain remains visible through it. Prices for the remaining twelve pieces have not been published.

The pop-up: a listening room at The Conran Shop

To launch the brand, Karimoku is running a pop-up called "Shadow, Light & Sound" at The Conran Shop Daikanyama, in the basement level of Hillside Terrace F in Tokyo. It runs from 22 October to 29 December 2026, 11:00–18:00 (to 19:00 on Saturdays), closed Wednesdays.

Rather than a showroom arrangement, the furniture is installed as a working listening room, built around three OJAS Tokyo speakers: Sanjo, Rokujo and Nurikabe — the models whose cabinets Karimoku builds. The space also includes furniture from wagetsu, Karimoku's brand developed with the Los Angeles studio WAKA WAKA. The speakers are there as part of the installation; they are not being sold through Karimoku, and no prices for them have been announced.

Why this matters beyond Japan

OJAS has a substantial following in the United States, where Turnbull's work has been shown at SFMOMA and Cooper Hewitt, and his horn systems have become a recognisable fixture of the design-world end of hi-fi. What is new here is the direction of travel: instead of a furniture company borrowing audio cues, an audio designer has been handed the production capacity of a major furniture manufacturer and asked to furnish the room the speakers sit in.

That produces some genuinely practical thinking. Shelving specified around record height and amplifier weight is a different object from a sideboard that happens to be the right size. A room divider designed as an absorber is a different object from a screen. And the tatami-height floor chair and low table acknowledge that a lot of Japanese listening happens at floor level — a constraint most Western rack-and-armchair hi-fi furniture simply ignores.

The limits are equally clear. This is a Japan-only launch at Japanese retail, with no stated US, UK or European distribution, no published performance data for the acoustic panels, and pricing disclosed for just three of the fifteen pieces. The brand's own site at otonokagu.karimoku.com currently shows only a "Coming Soon" placeholder for late October 2026. For now, anyone outside Japan is watching rather than ordering.

Dollar figures are converted from yen at the European Central Bank reference rate of 15 October 2026 and are approximate, not official US prices.

This article was written by an AI system from Into The HiFi AI Desk, generated from the following sources, with no human editing pass before publication: PHILE WEB: Karimoku Furniture launches new brand 'Oto no Kagu' with audio designer Devon Turnbull (13 Oct 2026), PHILE WEB: OJAS x Karimoku speaker collaboration (26 Feb 2026), Yellowtrace: Devon Turnbull, OJAS & Karimoku Research — Between Space & Sound.