Designers and manufacturers are notoriously secretive about new products, but Sato’s previous creations provide some hints about what to expect. Last year, with Italian furniture company Cappellini, he introduced the Antler chair, a deep seat with a backrest formed by wood-laminate reindeer “antlers.” “I had an image of the lobby of a hotel, where they have comfortable chairs, and I thought they looked like animals,” says Sato. “With antlers, the chairs really do look like a herd.” For another Italian company, Arketipo, he created Decoboco, a sofa whose three cushions vary in thickness and firmness, each offering a different sitting experience.

Antler and Decoboco seem cute, perhaps even naive, but Sato insists that both reflect his obsession with those small surprises, with aha moments. Some of his more involved products use technological trickery to achieve this effect. Hanabi, for instance, is a pendant lamp made with a heat-sensitive metal alloy that slowly curls open like a flower when the light is turned on; Polar is a set of three transparent nesting tables containing polarized film, which appear plain individually but reveal an intricate graphic pattern when stacked. More recently, Sato designed the Fadeout-Chair, which has a seat and backrest made of solid walnut, and clear acrylic legs partially painted with a wood grain pattern. The piece appears to be all wood, but the painted legs become transparent before reaching the floor, making it look as if the rest of the chair is hovering in space.

Sato’s most recognizable design to date is his simplest: the Cabbage Chair, a paper seat made from waste material left over from the production of Issey Miyake’s Pleats Please clothing. After standing a tight roll of the pleated paper on end, he made a single vertical cut through successive layers of the bundle, peeling them open until he’d reached the centre. The end result was a scooped seat. Although the chairs aren’t in commercial production, he believes uncut bundles could one day be shipped to buyers who would slice and shape the chairs themselves — garbage rebranded as designer furniture. Designed in 2008 for an exhibition at the 21_21 Design Sight museum in Tokyo, the Cabbage Chair is in the collections of MoMA, the Museum of Arts and Design, the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, and the Musée des arts décoratifs in Paris.

Though Sato once had reservations about the rigours of architecture school, his formal training has not gone to waste. In addition to furniture and consumer products, he routinely designs unconventional commercial spaces and houses in Japan. One of his most popular creations was a climbing wall for the Illoiha fitness club in Tokyo’s Omotesando neighbourhood. Instead of the usual artificial handholds, he dreamt up a scheme involving decorative pieces one might normally find in a house, which allowed climbers to move from an end table to a picture frame to a mirror to a deer trophy. “In the end,” says Sato, “people were paying more money to climb the wall than to use the gym.”

Nendo’s office, in the Meguro neighbourhood, is just as whimsical. The interior space is sliced up with floor-to-ceiling plywood panels featuring large, parabolic openings, some of which are used as entrances to different rooms. The surprise here is that the openings descend from the ceiling instead of coming up from the floor, creating a topsy-turvy world. Visitors might consider it inconvenient to have to avoid tripping over the tops of the doorways, but Sato maintains that the design has its advantages. “We have different zones for architecture, interiors, and products, but it all melts together,” he says. “If I stand up, I can see through everything and talk to everyone. There’s privacy, but also a feeling of connecting.”

While many of Sato’s concepts initially sound off the wall, in their execution his pieces make creative statements with clean, unfussy forms. His adoption by European manufacturers, who often favour zany, flamboyant designs, reflects this ability to stretch the boundaries of his country’s traditions. Sato is at heart a disciplined designer with a deep respect for Japan’s minimalist heritage; his surprises are never cheap or gratuitous. He is interested not so much in revolutionizing Japanese design as in seeking out its next evolution, blending its tradition of beauty and lightness with a little Western swagger. If that’s an uncommon mix, so much the better — it means he has remained as difficult to pin down as wet clay.