Daikin Donated Air Conditioners to a Museum Tea House — and Designed Them to Match the Room

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The Tokyo National Museum's garden holds two traditional tea houses, Kyūjōkan and Yōkokan, both still used for tea ceremony, with Yōkokan currently home to a small tea café open to visitors. Until recently, neither building had air conditioning, which made hosting guests through Tokyo's brutal summers and chilly winters a real challenge.

Appliance maker Daikin stepped in to donate units for both rooms — but what caught people's attention wasn't the donation itself, it was the execution. Instead of the plain white boxes you'd expect, Daikin fitted the tea houses with units from its higher-end design line, finished with panels styled after traditional Japanese lacquer inlay, so the machines blend into the room instead of sticking out of it.

Photos of the finished rooms started circulating, and people had a lot to say about just how good the units looked.