Willow Panel Gate opened in the summer of 2017 in a narrow shophouse on Ichibangai in Shimokitazawa, a neighbourhood already crowded with second-hand record shops and small theatres. Natsuki Igarashi had spent the previous five years in product development at Kobayashi Ceramics in Koenji, specifying glazes for tableware lines sold through department stores. The work was precise but distant from the act of making. She wanted a place where people who had never touched clay could still leave with something they had genuinely made. The studio name comes from a gate she sketched repeatedly during her Kyoto residency in 2015, a willow-flanked wooden panel gate at an inn near Fushimi that she passed every morning.
Willow Panel Gate started with six bisqueware shapes and a palette of eighteen underglaze colours sourced from Miyamoto Ceramic Supplies in Kiyomizu, Kyoto. The first few months were quiet. Natsuki ran every session alone, seven days a week, until a feature in a Shimokitazawa neighbourhood zine in early 2018 brought in a steady stream of regulars. She hired her first studio assistant, Yuki Tanaka, that spring. The palette has since grown to 36 colours, including a matte iron-oxide grey and a translucent celadon that Natsuki mixed herself over the course of two winters and now produces in small batches. The kiln, a Nabertherm front-loader, was installed in late 2019 after years of outsourcing firing to a kiln operator in Nerima.
Natsuki Igarashi studied ceramic arts at Musashino Art University, graduating in 2009, before spending three years as a studio assistant at Tsuchiya Pottery in Mashiko. She returned to Tokyo in 2012 to work in product design for Kobayashi Ceramics, where she developed a deep interest in underglaze painting techniques borrowed from Arita ware traditions. A residency in Kyoto in 2015, at a washi and clay atelier near Fushimi, sharpened her eye for surface pattern and negative space. Willow Panel Gate opened in Shimokitazawa in 2017. She reads design history in her spare time and keeps a small notebook of glaze colour recipes that she has been building since university.