Hi! This is Ale.

I’m writing a post to explain in detail how to get to Studio Kura from Fukuoka Airport or from Hakata Station (where the Shinkansen bullet train stops). I’m going to be very thorough but please don’t feel intimidated by the wall of text. It’s actually quite simple and you will get around by just asking for Ikisan, the nearest station to Studio Kura, and letting people help you.

Ikisan Station
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Hi! This is Ale.

You may or may not noticed that we have had more residence slots for a couple weeks. This is not because we partitioned all the rooms (we didn’t). It’s because we got an entire new house!

Once again, it’s a tradicional Japanese house. You’ll be living in a house similar to the ones your neighbors live in. And we’ve been hard at work getting everything ready for people to feel comfortable in this place.

Residence House 3 is near JR Ikisan station. It will only take you 3 minutes by foot, so please ask about vacancies in this particular house if you aren’t good with bicycles.

We are very happy to be able to accommodate more artists at once!

Hi! This Ale.
For years, we’ve had a stone oven in an open air location. We recently built a structure around it so it’s more comfortable to use.

The oven is hand made, the structure is hand made, and the pizza should be hand-made too!

We would love this place to become a community spot for artists and their Japanese neighbors to get together. Feel free to throw your own pizza party and share with your fellow artists and neighbors! Or whatever you can think of cooking in an oven. Maybe something special from your country?

Hi! This is Ale reporting some changes to our company and to the fees.

As you might know, we have had a new member in our staff for some months. Katsura has been great at coordinating the program, maintaining our blog, and keeping in touch with you all.

Thanks to her, our transition to 6 residence slots per month has been smooth, and we have an even more international environment here at the studio. We are looking forward to the program getting better every year, as it happened this year with the air conditioning for all rooms, a number of reforms at the houses, etc.

In other news, Studio Kura is a company bigger than the residence program, and it has been some years since we have been obligated to pay the value-added tax for all of our income. We have not been collecting it so we were paying that 8% ourselves, and we were happy to work this way while we were able to work it out. However, we knew we would need to start passing this tax to our artists some day.

Just as our spaces have become more comfortable lately, our running costs per slot have gone up so we needed our fee to reflect that. That makes this the right time to start collecting the value-added tax from our resident artists.

The new fee will start to be applied for 2017 slots, and will be 74,074 JPY per four weeks, plus value-added tax which is currently 8% turning the fee into 80,000 JPY (tax included). The deposit will still be 10,000 JPY.

Fees going up seldom look good, but we are happy to be able to offer more comfort and a better service for little much, and we will keep striving to do our best on this budget.

It’s hot and very sunny in Itoshima! If only all this sunlight could be turned into electricity…

So, we installed solar panels on the second residence house! All further artists will be welcomed by ecologic energy.