Picture this: the Mad Hatter leaves his Wonderland tea party, run off to Japan, opens a mental health clinic (of all things) and turns the colour switch off for a perfectly black and white result. This little scenario is about as unlikely as the clinic's interiors and yet it must have taken a rather bonkers designer to come up with it; in this case Nendo, the Japanese architecture collective made up of a single designer (Oki Sato of Milan Design Week fame).

Anyone entering this clinic apparently devoid of mental health issues is unlikely to exit in a similar state of sanity. Nothing is quite like it seems and there is very little sense to be made of things indeed. Doors do not open, random sections of the wall do so instead; other doors open onto windows and bookshelves slide as they do in spy films (only there is no treasure lying behind, merely a consultation room).

Was the point to turn the existing patients into a lifetime clientele? The initial intention was to offer them more than meets the eye, that is more than would be available in their daily lives. And what better to break the monotony than sliding bookcases?

The central figure is the door: fake doors, unexpected doors, cheeky doors. Apparently there is also a metaphor in there somewhere; for the doors opening inside people's hearts and minds. Whether interior design can go that far we are a little unsure but we wonder whether, just like two wrongs make a right... do two mads make a sane? We might just check our rather insane selves into the Akasaka clinic and find out...

Source and credits: Design Boom, Dezeen