Mika Tanigawa started Spruce Crest Path in the winter of 2017, working at a folding table in a rented room in Matsumoto. The name came from the path behind the building, a narrow track lined with spruce that ran up toward the crest of the hill. She had spent the previous four years as a metalwork technician at a craft school in Kyoto, setting up equipment, maintaining tools, and watching students learn. She learned more from that job than she expected. Watching beginners make mistakes taught her which steps actually mattered and which ones were just habit. The first pieces she sold were at a winter market in Matsumoto in December 2017. She sold eleven rings and one pendant. She went home and made more.
The studio moved to its current space in Nagano city in the spring of 2019. It is a small room on the second floor of an old timber building on Chuo-dori, with a north-facing window that gives good flat light all day. The bench is a solid oak door blank on trestles, which Mika Tanigawa has never replaced because it is the right height and the right weight. The tools are mostly Japanese-made: Vessel files, Hozan pliers, a Knew Concepts saw frame she ordered from California in 2020 and uses every day. The design language settled around 2019 as well. Isometric grids, flat planes, deliberate angles. Not because it was fashionable but because it was the kind of thing she wanted to wear and could not find anywhere.
Mika Tanigawa trained as a metalwork technician at a craft school in Kyoto, where she spent four years maintaining tools and setting up equipment before starting Spruce Crest Path in Matsumoto in 2017. She moved the studio to Nagano city in 2019. Her bench is an oak door blank on trestles that she has never replaced. She works through four grits of wet-dry paper on every edge and keeps a small notebook of rejected angles. On days off she walks the path behind the old building where the studio name came from.