“Have you been to Chairigami?,” a neighbor asked. I hadn’t even heard of it, but I immediately appreciated the concept. For years I’ve been folding origami animals and other objects to put in with my daughters’ school lunches. (I thought when they learned how to read, they’d be happy to move on to written lunchbox notes, but they still want the origami.) Origami is a language I speak. And here’s a guy who’d adapted the ancient Asian paperfolding artform to furniture and home furnishing.

A sexy small-business story for the local press, to be sure, especially since the proprietor is a Yale student and his York Street storefront has been given him gratis for one month through the munificence of Yale’s University Properties landlords.

The stories have celebrated the cleverness of the concept, the difficulties of starting up a small business, the aesthetic qualities and consumer demand for the chairs and other offerings in the shop. But unless you’ve done it yourself, it’s hard to convey the joy and wonderment of folding paper into sturdy objects of beauty.

I walked by Chairigami a few days after it opened. It was after 9 p.m., closing time for York Street and Broadway businesses. A time of night when the excitement had already shifted to the crowd in line outside Toad’s, or the pizza shops already into the first-wave of late-night snackers.

Chairigami’s door was still open. The place was brightly lit. The furniture looked immaculate and lovely. Pop music was blaring from a boombox. And there, alone in the shop was the chairman of Chairigami, bopping and weaving and dancing to the music, enlivened and entranced by this miraculous little world he had folded himself into.