Hasta La Ideas

Slideshow: overlapping openings in the walls and ceilings of this Tokyo house by Japanese architects Suppose Design Office create dozens of views between rooms.

Contained within a rectangular wooden volume, the family house accommodates rooms for living and sleeping on its two main floors, plus an open-plan loft accessed by ladders.

Some rooms on the ground floor are set at a lower level than the corridors, while the attic storage areas are raised up slightly higher than the surrounding floor.

Narrow handrails screen balconies on the upper two floors, so residents have to be careful not to slip over the edges.

Other popular houses by Suppose Design Office include one where interior walls don’t touch the floor – see more projects by the architects here.

You can also see all our stories about houses in Japan here.

Here’s a few key details from the architects:

House in Kokubunji

Location: Kokubunji city,Tokyo,Japan

Principal use: personal house

Site area: 109.11sqm

Building area: 62.53sqm

Total floor area: 119.21sqm ( 1F:62.53sqm 2F:56.68sqm )

Completion: September. 2011

Design period: November.2009-December.2010

Construction period: December.2010-September. 2011

Structure: Wood

Storeys: 2

Client: a couple and two children

Project architect: Makoto Tanijiri [suppose design office]+ Hiroshi Ohno [Ohno JAPAN]

Project team: Makoto Tanijiri [suppose design office]+ Hiroshi Ohno [Ohno JAPAN], in-charge;Keisuke Katayama

Ground floor plan

First floor plan

Second floor plan

Cross section

Translucent windows create a glowing frame around the facade of this Tokyo townhouse when the lights are turned on inside.

Designed by Japanese studio Yoritaka Hayashi Architects, House in Nakameguro has four storeys but is the same height as surrounding three storey residences.

Plywood lines the interior walls of the two middle floors, which include a first-floor living room and kitchen plus two second-floor bedrooms.

Built-in plywood furniture is arranged around the edges of rooms on these floors to create flexible open spaces.

A white porcelain-tiled bathroom is located on the top floor and leads out onto a rooftop balcony.

Our readers all seem to love houses in Japan – see more of them here.

Photography is by Takumi Ota.

Here’s some more explanation from Yoritaka Hayashi:

House in Nakameguro / Yoritaka Hayashi Architects

This is a small house standing in a small site in centre of the city.

Most newly-built houses around the site are being converted to three storey buildings.

Planning four storeys with the same volume of three storey buildings allows different perspective which enables this house to have an open interior space.

As a consequence, this building has a annular openings which appears as an abstract and continuous ribbon of light in the interior space. This ribbon erases the edge of the interior space, and makes the outline of the space obscure.

Thus the space has a stretch from the inside to outside.

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Besides, the furniture arranged on the facade side is opposite to the usual arrangement and is treated as an extension of the building, giving the space suitable scale and enabling us to use the space effectively.

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Year: December of 2010
Collaborators: Akira Suzuki / ASA (Structural Engineer) , Takasou Takahashi / SESSE-Design (Façade Consultant)

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Area: Meguro, Tokyo, Japan
Site area: 40.01 m2

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Building area: 32.17 m2
Total floor area: 99.80 m2
Structure: steel frame

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Tokyo architects Naoi have completed a three-tiered woodland summerhouse at Japanese holiday spot Nasu Kogen.

Named Tiered Lodge, the split-level house contains a kitchen and dining room on its lower floor, a living room on the middle level and a mezzanine loft and bedroom above.

Large parts of the facade slide open to help cool the house during the warm summer months.

Residents enter the house across a decked balcony and seating area, which leads straight into the lower floor dining room.

Naoi also recently completed a square house with an off-centre courtyard – see it here.

Photography is by Hiroshi Ueda.

Here’s some more text from the architects:

Tiered Lodge

For this project, we were commissioned to build a second home for a husband-and-wife couple and their young son. The client requested a simple space that would allow him to take a step back from the daily demands of his busy schedule and help to rejuvenate his body and mind.

The site is located in Nasu Kogen, a well-known summer resort area in Japan that lies at an altitude of 1,000m. Dense groves of deciduous trees can be found nearby, making the area a popular retreat during the sweltering summer months. In the winter, however, temperatures drop below freezing point, and snowfall of up to 80cm has been recorded.

Elevation varies a total of 8m across the entire site running from east to west. Making use of this sloping gradient, we decided to design a residence that would create a sense of continuity with the forest around it.

The first step was to configure two volumes lying next to each other that corresponded to the contours of the terrain, and then to shift these volumes along both the horizontal and vertical axes. Through this process, we were able to create a level surface that could bridge the gap between the cross-section of the lodge and the forest outside it, while also prompting an awareness of changes in the topography of the site.

The space that emerged as a result of this elevation difference and shifts in the surface of the floor showcases subtle variations in the size of each volume, the windows, and the quality of the light in each interior. This structure enabled us to endow what is essentially a single-roomed space with remarkable depth and variation.

The dining and kitchen area, which opens directly onto the outdoor terrace and features an open stairwell, is situated in the southwest corner of the site, making it a fluid space with a distinctively bright, open quality.

The living room situated on the far eastern end of the site, on the other hand, is configured as a zone of peace and quiet where the family can gather around the fireplace.

The loft, located on a mezzanine that lies above the living room, is a suspended space lying in mid-air that offers the inhabitants a commanding, elevated view of the trees outside the lodge.

The sliding doors at the corner of the dining and living area, which can be stowed inside the wall, give the boundaries between the interior and exterior of the house an ambiguous character. For the façade, special efforts were made to preserve the integrity of the forested landscape by installing exterior walls covered in cedar boards and a continuous series of slit windows.

By paying close attention to the possibilities presented by a given site, and giving spatial form to its distinctive qualities, we hope to be able to continue creating buildings that showcase the beauty that belongs to the realm of architecture.

Light floods into this Kyoto house by Japanese studio FORM/Kouichi Kimura Architects through a light well in its enormous chimney.

The two-storey residence, named House of Representation, occupies a countryside location and has an off-white rendered exterior.

Rooms on the house’s ground floor surround a central living room with a recessed stone floor.

A staircase with glass handrails leads up to a study on the first floor, as well as a bedroom that opens out to a rooftop balcony.

We’ve published lots of houses by FORM/Kouichi Kimura Architects on Dezeen, all with rendered monochrome exteriors – take a closer look at them all here.

Photography is by Takumi Ota.

Here’s a little more explanation from the architects:

House of representation

This house is planned on a site from where there are beautiful views of the country side.

The request from the client was for the creation of intimacy, but with large living area.

The exterior is designed as a monumental form so that it can seem to be a new addition to the countryside scenery.

I created a centripetal plan where each room is connected through a corridor from the multi-level living area.

Around the corridor, walls, which have different textures and shapes, make a sequence inside the space.

The walls and spaces are highlighted by natural, indirect light, so your eyes are drawn to, and focus on, the interior.

By the basic process of manipulating and controlling “light” and “views”, I tried to make the inside space more intimate and deeper.

Rather than doing large gestures of acrobatic space composition, I have instead created what I feel is a space that represent the unusual, by doing small and poetic movements that control light and the viewers eyes.

Architect: Form/Kouichi Kimura Architects
Location: Kyoto, Japan
Client: Private

Construction: 2011
Site area: 355.78 m
Construction area: 213.20 m

Here are some images by photographer Iwan Baan of a house by Japanese architect Sou Fujimoto, where rectangular windows puncture three layers of walls and ceilings.

Located in Oita, Japan, House N was constructed in 2008 to accommodate a couple and their pet dog.

Openings in the outer wall and roof aren’t glazed, so the patio garden, bathroom and kitchen contained behind are open to the elements.

A bedroom and tatami room are encased behind the second layer, where all window openings are infilled with glass.

The innermost layer closes in around the centre of the house, wrapping around a living and dining room.

See more projects by Sou Fujimoto here, including a stack of four house-shaped apartments.

Here’s some more text from Sou Fujimoto Architects:

House N
Oita, Japan

A home for two plus a dog. The house itself is comprised of three shells of progressive size nested inside one another. The outermost shell covers the entire premises, creating a covered, semi-indoor garden. Second shell encloses a limited space inside the covered outdoor space. Third shell creates a smaller interior space. Residents build their life inside this gradation of domain.

I have always had doubts about streets and houses being separated by a single wall, and wondered that a gradation of rich domain accompanied by various senses of distance between streets and houses might be a possibility, such as: a place inside the house that is fairly near the street; a place that is a bit far from the street, and a place far off the street, in secure privacy.

That is why life in this house resembles to living among the clouds. A distinct boundary is nowhere to be found, except for a gradual change in the domain. One might say that an ideal architecture is an outdoor space that feels like the indoors and an indoor space that feels like the outdoors. In a nested structure, the inside is invariably the outside, and vice versa. My intention was to make an architecture that is not about space nor about form, but simply about expressing the riches of what are `between` houses and streets.

Three nested shells eventually mean infinite nesting because the whole world is made up of infinite nesting. And here are only three of them that are given barely visible shape. I imagined that the city and the house are no different from one another in the essence, but are just different approaches to a continuum of a single subject, or different expressions of the same thing- an undulation of a primordial space where humans dwell. This is a presentation of an ultimate house in which everything from the origins of the world to a specific house is conceived together under a single method.

Architects: Sou Fujimoto Architects
Sou Fujimoto, principal-in-charge;
Yumiko Nogiri, project team

Consultants: Jun Sato Structural Engineers, structural
Structural system: reinforced concrete

Major materials: reinforced concrete
Site area: 236.57㎡
Built area: 150.57㎡
Total floor area: 85.51㎡
Structural Composition: RC; 1 story
Design Period: 2006 – 2007
Construction Period: will be completed in 2008

Design team: Sou Fujimoto Architects
Consultant: Jun Sato Structural Engineer