Named House J, the two-storey residence contains three split levels that enclose the central courtyard. There are few external windows, but most face inward towards the courtyard.

Half-height staircases run along the east and west sides of the courtyard, creating the three split levels, while the secluded roof terrace begins at the top of the spiral.

"This house was designed for a client in need of privacy and seclusion from the outside," says Keiko Maita Architect Office, explaining the rationale behind the layout. "The continuity between the interior and exterior spaces increases the size of the house."

The architects used horizontal timber siding to clad the exterior walls, plus wooden floors run through the entire house.

Part of the structure is raised up from the ground to allow a driveway for two cars to slot underneath.

Other recently completed houses in Japan include a weekend retreat shaped like a children's shape-sorter toy and an opaque house above a pet shop. See more Japanese houses on Dezeen, or see our Pinterest board filled with Japanese residences.

Here are a few extra details from Keiko Maita Architect Office:

House J

The "House J" is a small house (100m2) situated in Yamaguchi-prefecture, Japan. This house was designed for a client in need of privacy and seclusion from the outside. The site is narrow (120m2) and is surrounded by residences.

The "House J" has three floors that are built around a small inner garden: 1st floor: dining room, kitchen, family space; 2nd floor: study, reading space; 3rd floor: bedroom.

The three floors are connected together by a roof terrace.

The spaces of the house are open toward the inner garden. The inner garden is also visible from the roof terrace. The inner garden is exclusive in a narrow site but the continuity between the interior and exterior spaces increases the size of the house.

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Architect Office appeared first on Dezeen.

Designed by Tokyo studio Yasutaka Yoshimura Architects, Nowhere but Sajima forms part of the Nowhere Resort, a series of weekly rentable holiday homes on the Miura peninsula of Kanagawa Prefecture.

The house is located on the harbour of a small fishing village. It has a triangular plan, with rooms on three storeys.

Each of the windows lines up with a different room and the ceiling of every room follows the profile of its window.

The architects describe the rooms as "thin tube-like spaces" with views directed towards the ocean. "We have created a place reminiscent of looking out to sea from the deck of a ship," they explain.

Sliding doors and screens allow different rooms to open out to one another, plus a circular cutaway provides views between the first-floor study and the storey above.

See more holiday homes on Dezeen, including a set of apartments above a yacht house on the Crimean coastline and a weekend fishing retreat in Germany.

Here are more details from Yasutaka Yoshimura Architects:

Nowhere but Sajima

Cutting resort environment out of urban environment

Nowhere resort is the resort program that is renting out weekly vacation house. Suggesting new urban lifestyle by making shorter the distance to weekend house from standard 3 hours up to 1 hour. The environment must get close to urban when shorten the distance, the issue comes to how to cut off resort environment out of there. Therefore Nowhere but Sajima comes to build long and thin tube-like spaces that bundle them into one home unit. The tube-like spaces are facing toward the ocean and at the same time intercept the sight from the next condominium. The building is controlling both privacy and scenery.

A home for guests

Nowhere but Sajima provides a temporary 'home' for its guests. The weekly rental service provided by Nowhere Resort is a relatively new method of operating resort properties in Japan, and allows different tenants the opportunity to inhabit a 'home' on a weekly basis. While the weekly term is short compared to a standard monthly rental and long compared to a hotel stay, this in-between length accommodates a new diversity of uses of a 'home'. Serving as a space for exhibitions, as a classroom or for wedding parties, the unit easily adapts to the imagination and invention of the tenant and in doing so also re-defines the range of activities that can take place in the 'home'. As well as accommodating the functions of work and business, the 'home' again becomes the space of many life events beside the basic function of 'inhabitance'. In acquiring a new program for use, the 'home' regains the richness of activity that can take place all around of life.

The building, a triangular block composed of tube-like volumes heading to the ocean, stands on a point of reclaimed land in a small fishing village. While the site meets the seawall and directly faces the sea, it is also faces other buildings across the water. To provide adequate privacy without the use of curtains, narrow tube-shaped spaces were bundled together and angled to provide openings toward the sea. The orientation of these tubes naturally blocks the line of sight from the adjacent apartments and while gazing down the length of the tube from inside only the ocean can be seen. While providing an escape from the tide of urbanism characterising what we normally call a 'resort', the design still maintains the key aspects of the resort experience. We have created a place reminiscent of looking out to sea from the deck of a ship.

Location: Yokosuka Kanagawa, JAPAN
Principal Use: HouseStructure: RC 3 stories

Site Area: 132.09 sq.m
Building Area: 63.88 sq.m
Total Floor Area: 176.65 sq.m
Max Height: 9,459 mm

Architect: Yasutaka Yoshimura Architects
Client: Nowhere resort
Structural Engineer: Akira Suzuki/ASA
Services: EOS+
Electric Services: comodo
General Contractor: Heisei Construction

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Yasutaka Yoshimura Architects appeared first on Dezeen.

Adapting part of a three-storey house, Yasunari Tsukada planned the interior as a grid of partitioned rooms that maintain the same clarity as an open-plan residence.

"The client requested a home where he could feel the presence of his family throughout the building, while at the same time having the calm and relaxing sensation of being in a private room," explains the designer.

The mezzanine floor runs across the centre of the space, accessed by a metal staircase near the entrance. There are no walls around it, only balustrades, so residents can look down onto any of the surrounding rooms.

Large windows and doorways also open rooms out to one another. There are a few sliding doors, so some of the spaces can be made more private when necessary.

"Each space also contains two or more windows or openings, giving rise to a multilayered space with no sense of hierarchy within it," says Tsukada.

An existing glass-block wall that previously encased a stairwell gives a curved outline to a new living room, plus a single concrete wall is the backdrop for a television.

The ceiling of the residence follow the angle of the roof. Bare lightbulbs hang down from it on long cables, while others are mounted sideways onto the walls.

Japanese designer Yasunari Tsukada more recently completed a beauty salon in Osaka with a timber lattice stretching across one wall.

Other new Japanese residences include an apartment with a sunken circular living room and an opaque house balanced above a pet shop. See more architecture in Japan.

Photography is by Stirling Elmendorf.

Here's some more information from Yasunari Tsukada:

House in Takamatsu

Our client was initially inclined to build a new house. After much consideration, however, he decided to partly renovate his three-storey family house, and use it as a residence for a two-generation family.

The client requested a home where he could feel the presence of his family throughout the building, while at the same time having the calm and relaxing sensation of being in a private room. By enveloping each room with a sloping ceiling to make use of the existing building, we wondered if we could create an ambiguously defined space that would feel as if it had been partitioned, while still maintaining a sense of coherence and unity.

The components that make up each individual room are gate-like walls, which consist mainly of openings. The roof gradient and heights of the sash windows were determined in accordance with the original height of the living room, which was 2400mm. The heights of the walls also took their cue from this figure, and were set at 2400mm. Although it seems as if this height has been deployed with excessive frequency within the space, doing away with ceilings for the individual rooms while covering them with a single, sloping ceiling and installing windows at a number of positions along the walls allowed us to create a sort of landscape that presented a very different face to the familiar surroundings. Each space also contains two or more windows or openings, giving rise to a multilayered space with no sense of hierarchy within it.

The renovation process involves thinking about how we can devise new spaces while respecting a given set of conditions imposed by the existing building, as well as the client's requirements. The glass blocks from the large staircase and stairwell were transformed into a part of the living room and the reading space, while the innocuous reinforced concrete wall that originally supported the staircase was given a new lease of life as the wall that one notices most of all on a daily basis. For our client, this space helped to give things and objects new meanings, and became invested with new stories and narratives – a process that prompted him to rethink the possibilities of design through renovation.

Project Name: House in Takamatsu
Project Type: residence renovation
Location: Takamatsu-city, Kagawa, Japan
Completion: 2012 May
Design: Yasunari Tsukada design
Contractor: Shikoku Housing

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by Yasunari Tsukada appeared first on Dezeen.

The pet shop occupies the ground floor of the building, while a two-storey house is contained in the precarious-looking upper volume and overhangs the glass facade to create a sheltered entrance to the shop.

"The upper unit presents a sharp contrast to the open, transparent lower layer, with its weighty, massive appearance almost like a heavily-armed tank defending the rather indoorsy life of the client's family," says N Maeda Atelier.

The plaster-covered walls of the house have a textured surface that the architects based on an image of a cloudy sky, with the same variations of light and dark. There are no sharp edges, as all four corners are chamfered.

"On a cloudy day, the floating mass looks as if it blends in with the sky, while its edges lose their individual materiality as they melt into the gradational clouds in the background," says the studio.

Natural light floods into the house through a skylight that stretches across most of the roof. Rooms are arranged around a double-height atrium, allowing light to permeate most of the interior.

A kitchen, lounge and traditional Japanese room occupy the lowest level of the residence, while a spiral staircase leads up to a gridded metal mezzanine with a bedroom and bathroom beyond.

In contrast with the austere facade, the interior walls are lined with plywood, which the architects have sliced up into boards and coated with a thin layer of white paint.

The owner of the residence also runs the pet shop downstairs, so a second spiral staircase leads down from to the "dog-run" yard at the back of the building.

Other seemingly windowless houses featured recently from Japan include a monolithic white home in Miyazaki and a residence in Tochigi with a six-metre high living room. See more Japanese houses on Dezeen.

Photography is by Studio Dio.

Here's more information from Norisada Maeda:

TORUS: Transcribing the Sky onto the Façade

Composition: First Floor

Basic composition of TORUS is a bilayer structure consisted of a white, half-amorphous box floating on the lower layer softly surrounded by glass and perforated aluminum panels.

The transparency and the openness of this layer is a natural solution for the functional requirement to expose the presence of the salon to prospective customers and other passer-bys, as well as to open up the ground outside the shop area surrounded by the curved perforated partitions as "dog-run" field where dogs can freely run around.

The apparently free line of the curved wall is actually based on our careful recognition of what we call the "welcoming zones", i.e., the pocket areas required to open up to the urban context outside the building site. The cutting-outs of such zones as parking, entrance and spaces for outdoor equipment have resulted in the irregular curve of the wall as the output of such operations.

Composition: Second and Third Floors

The upper unit containing two floors within presents a sharp contrast to the open, transparent lower layer with its weighty, massive appearance almost like a heavily-armed tank defending the rather indoorsy life of the client's family. With a closer look, the surface of the wall shows a texture similar to a handmade pottery instead of that of a flat, uniform industrial product.

Texture: Exterior Wall

The pottery-like texture is the result of painstaking manual operation of repeatedly applying and spreading the waterproof material onto the wall. Beside such a consideration to the close-up texture, the exterior of this second layer also involves our sensitivity to the longer-distance outlook of the building, which is realized by an operation of transcribing the sky onto the wall.

The transcription process is as following: first, we took a picture of the sky right above the site on the day of framework completion (phase 1); the picture was then abstracted into a gray-scale gradation graphic (phase 2), which we applied as the contour map of the undulating surface by carefully duplicating it on the four sides of the wall; finally, we covered the surface with finishing mortar while controlling its thickness (varied from 0 to 30mm) based on the contour lines – and thus emerged the ambiguous cloudy sky texture. The finished wall naturally takes on a feature of the sky with wispy clouds.

The treatment of the exterior wall has allowed us to produce quirky and blurry edges on the corners of the floating box, which is obviously different from the familiar sight of sharp edges of building corners fashioned with usual industrial materials, and thus make this architecture stand out in the ordinary cityscape.

On a cloudy day, the floating mass looks as if it blends in with the sky, while its edges lose their individual materiality as they melt into the gradational clouds in the background. TORUS is probably a rare architecture that looks much better under clouds than clear sky.

Interior composition: Internal Void (through second and third floors)

Let us move up into the massive floating box, which appears extremely exclusive of the surrounding urban context. Beside the entrance door is a small pocket space: although it is still an open-air space, it somehow bears an indoor atmosphere due to the careful treatment of proportions and openings. Right inside the entrance door is a huge void within the massive box.

This is the particular atmosphere inside TORUS, a doughnut-like geometry with one big opening within. While the outlook of the building implies ultimate closure, it embraces a surprisingly voluminous space or "The Outside" almost mistakable for a street or a patio – which is actually a glass-covered interior void.

Interior Texture: Internal Void

The prior factor of this "outside effect" is obviously the gigantic top light on the roof, but there is another, rather obscure one: the rugged interior wall finish.

The material itself is actually an ordinary, cheap plywood panel available in any hardware store in Japan. To give the particular tactile quality to this daily material, we cut the panels into narrow boards of 200mm width each and then manually removed the soft parts from each and every board to let the hard grains stand out on the surface.

With the finishing white paint (which needed a special preparation to evenly paint over the water-absorbing and non-absorbing portions of the surface), the ordinary material has been turned into a unique finishing material like this.

This extremely labor- and time-consuming work was all done by our staff and the students of the private school led by the chief architect Norisada Maeda, and it took about two months to finish all the boards necessary to fill up the interior wall of the building (it is unimaginable how much it would have costed if the work has been committed to professional carpenters and the painters…). The resulted difference may appear rather slight and obscure from a distance, but a closer look will show the rough, but also tasteful texture of the artificially aged wall.

General-purpose industrial materials like plywood panels usually require - or even boast of - ultimate evenness of their qualities, although they can never get rid of slight differences in, for example, their wood grains. It echoes with the contemporary consumers' taste for orderly outlook of such evenly processed materials. We consider, however, such myopic taste for apparent cleanliness and/or orderliness as one of the big reasons for the qualitative poverty of today's architecture.

Even the plywood boards have individual characteristics, like each and every human individual has different face and life history. The artificial aging treatment to expose the individual "wood" nature within each and every industrially-processed plywood is a sort of a manifestation of our homage to the wooden materials that make up the actual architectural space.

Summary

As described above, the particular focus in TORUS can be summarized as following: clear-cut segmentation of lower and upper layers; "cutting-outs" of spaces from the surrounding urban context; unique treatment of inside/outside; invention of new texture treatment. TORUS has come to life with these considerations blended in together to realize the true richness of a residential space in the given context.

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N Maeda Atelier appeared first on Dezeen.

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