By Design takes a closer look at the world of design, in moments big and small.

IN 1919, THE Czech American architect Antonin Raymond and his wife and creative partner, the French-born American artist Noémi Raymond, traveled to Tokyo to help Frank Lloyd Wright construct the Imperial Hotel. While working on the project, they decided to set up their practice in Japan, where they remained — apart from a stint in the United States during and after World War II — until 1970. One of Antonin’s protégés, Junzo Yoshimura, who is said to have developed an interest in architecture after his father took him to the Imperial Hotel as a teenager, would later popularize Japanese Modernism in the United States, creating a house for the garden at New York’s Museum of Modern Art and two buildings for the future vice president Nelson Rockefeller’s family estate in Pocantico Hills, N.Y. But Yoshimura achieved most of his success in Japan; by the time of his death in 1997, at age 88, he was responsible for the schematic design for a wing of Emperor Hirohito’s palace in Tokyo as well as several dozen private houses across the country, including a three-bedroom weekend home in the cliffside town of Atami on the Pacific, where, at the request of the beauty mogul Hatsuko Endo, he carpeted each space in a different color.