Hasta La Ideas

This narrow house in Osaka by Ido, Kenji Architectural Studio contains hollow white boxes for stairs and a skewed upper storey.

The three-storey house replaces the residents’ former home on the same site, which suffered from a lack of natural light due to its proximity to the neighbouring buildings.

The architects increased the available light by rotating the second floor by 14 degrees, angling a pair of rooms towards a large corner window.

The rotation also creates voids above the staircases, which allow light to penetrate from the roof down to the lower levels.

Angular white boxes cantilever out from the wall to create sets of steps that appear to float upwards.

The main bedroom and bathroom are located on the ground floor, while the living room and concrete kitchen take up the first floor.

The angled second floor contains the children’s bedrooms and has a tapered wall on one side to further open up the space.

The final staircase leads up to a roof terrace which is partially covered.

Other houses in Osaka we’ve featured include a building that cantilevers dramatically over its driveway and a house with a faceted concrete exterior.

We’ve also featured lots of unusual staircases on Dezeen, including one with floating wooden treads and a zig-zag handrail – see more stories about staircases here.

See all our stories about Japanese houses »
See all our stories about Osaka »

Photographs are by Yohei Sasakura.

Here’s some more information from the architects:

House in Tamatsu
The house is designed for 4 members of a family with two kids. The house is placed at urban district and a small plot of only 43.21sqm in Osaka, Japan. Around the site is the mixed-use area where small houses, small factories and small office buildings coexist together without any harmony.

The client’s former house, which stood at this site, was a wooden two-storey house. The adjacent sites were close and natural light didn’t enter into the old house. Therefore the client requested the family room (living area, dining area and kitchen) to be as large as possible without pillars or load-bearing walls, and that natural light that comes into the house, especially into the family room.

First, since the site was narrow, the volume of the building took up as much of the site as possible. According to the lifestyle of the client, the bedroom of the couple and wet areas were placed in the ground floor, the family room was placed in the first floor, the rooms of children were placed in the second floor and the terrace was placed on the roof.

For a structural reason, the large openings were not able to open out on the road side of the first floor of the building. So the architects rotated the volume of the second floor 14 degrees for the axis of the building, and interstitial spaces between the rotated wall and the outer wall of a building became voids.

The skylight was set up in the upside of the void, and is intended to allow natural light to drop on the family room of the first floor.

Site plan

Moreover, one of two walls rotated 14 degrees on the plan of the second floor is also inclined to the verticality, and the part which overlaps with the stairs is turned up and has become like origami or a facet. This inclined wall frees people’s feeling by deviation from the norm, simultaneously the sense of touch of the degree of inclination and the light to reflect of that inclination causes a new physical sense.

Ground floor plan

The building’s white box is completely different from the building of the neighbourhood. It is the appearance which the cylindrical volume of the second floor rotated 14 degrees penetrates into the building. Box-shaped cantilevered stairs are floating in the void.

First floor plan

Project Name: House in Tamatsu
Use: residence
Site: Osaka, Japan
Architect: Kenji Ido / Ido, Kenji Architectural Studio
Design period: March 2011 – February 2012
Construction period: March 2012 – July 2012

Second floor plan

Structural engineer: Masakazu Taguchi / Taguchi Atelier Planning Structure
Structure system: timber construction
Total floor area is 94.46 sqm.
Building area is 32.75 sqm.
Plot area is 43.21sqm.
Building scale: 3 storeys

Roof terrace plan

The post House in Tamatsu
by Ido, Kenji Architectural Studio appeared first on Dezeen.

Here’s another project from Japanese designer Reiichi Ikeda, this time a hair salon in Osaka with diagonally striped wood and frosted glass (+ slideshow).

The salon’s sparse interior contains a wooden counter and screen walls which hide the storage and washing areas.

The glass on the shop window is frosted with stripes intended to produce a flickering moiré pattern at viewpoints where they overlap.

The angle of the lines matches the IRO logo, in which the ‘O’ has been rotated to the same degree as the axis of the earth.

Ikeda worked on the concept and the graphic design with Yuma Harada of UMA/design farm.

The bare concrete floor and exposed ceiling make the shop seem unfinished, like the Osaka fashion boutique designed by Ikeda that we featured earlier this week.

Another Ikeda design we featured recently was a clothes shop with a wire-mesh box inside it.

See more stories about salons »
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Photographs are by Yoshiro Masuda.

Here’s more information from the designer:

Design concept:

This is an interior design for a hair salon in Osaka, Japan. The interior design was by Reiichi Ikeda of reiichi ikeda design, and the graphic design including the logo design was by Yuma Harada of UMA/design farm. The two companies shared the concept with each other and comprehensively directed the hair salon together.

Generally, a hair salon has a conventional traffic line of waiting, shampooing, cutting, and so on. To add uniqueness, I dotted some visually standardized box-shaped objects such as furniture and a spot that have roles.

The angle of the diagonal lines which constitute the facade and the interior visual effects follows the concept of the logo “IRO”. The “O” in the logo “IRO” is rotated 23.43 degrees to be parallel to the axis of the earth.

Even though the Japanese word “IRO” means colours in English, we considered it as what gives us the seasonal indications with the Sun, instead of as being colourful. The light streaming through the diagonal lines and its shadows shifts from season to season.

Additionally, the moiré effect caused by the overlapping lines helps to bring out the visual movement in the design.

Project Name: IRO
Use: Hair salon
Location: 2-7-17-105, Minami-Horie, Nishi-ku, Osaka-city, Osaka, Japan 550-0015
Store floor area: 59.4 square metres
Completion of construction: Mar. 30, 2012
Interior Designer: Reiichi Ikeda and Yuma Harada
Photography: Yoshiro Masuda

The post IRO by
Reiichi Ikeda appeared first on Dezeen.

Designer Reiichi Ikeda has come up with a shop for Japanese fashion brand Wonderland that has a small wooden house inside.

Ikeda left the interior of the Not Wonder Store in Osaka bare with a glazed shop front and simple wooden rails and tables.

Bare timber has been used to construct the miniature house, which contains an office and fitting room.

Like a lot of projects we’ve featured from Japan, the shop uses materials that make it seem unfinished – check out more of them here.

We also recently featured two transparent facades from Japan – this exposed cedar house in Osaka prefecture and this glass box house near Kobe.

Have a look at our Pinterest board of shops featured on Dezeen.

See more stories from Japan »

Photographs are by Yoshiro Masuda.

Here’s some information from the designer:

This is an interior design for a clothing store and an atelier of the fashion brand Wonderland in Osaka, Japan. On my first visit, what made me feel as if it is outside even though there was the ceiling was that there wasn’t an entrance to define the border.

I made it a point to keep this strange and unique feeling, and tried making new interiors. I mean that I did not simply change the interior design to a radically new one, but I maximized the effect of the existing elements.

People very differently picture a world behind a closed door. So by setting up an entrance at the unimagined point, I expected a favorable effect on the “shift of the border”.

The area made by the shift of the border gets you a bit confused, and you will lose the idea where you are in or out. As a result, you find yourself coming in the shop.

Project Name: Not Wonder Store
Use: Clothing store
Location: 1-4-5-101, Toyosaki, Kita-ku, Osaka-city, Osaka, Japan 531-0072

Store floor area: 31.68 square meters
Completion of construction: Mar. 24, 2012
Interior Designer: Reiichi Ikeda
Photographer: Yoshiro Masuda

The post Not Wonder Store
by Reiichi Ikeda appeared first on Dezeen.

Japanese architects Ninkipen! have planted a tree at the centre of this hair salon in Kadoma and surrounded it with mirrored A-frames.

Half of these mirrors are arranged at right angles to the other half so that customers don’t have to look one another in the eye when having a haircut.

More plants are scattered around the salon, while a spotty dog statue greets customers at the door.

Small splashes of colour also crop up around the space on chairs, ornaments and electrical cable surrounds.

See more projects by Ninkipen! here, including an office with a bubbly facade.

Photography is by Hiroki Kawata.

Here’s some more text from the architects:

This is an interior design for a hair salon in Osaka, Japan.

First of all, we plant a pachira is 3m in height, and put mirrors around it like a swirl. Next, we set more mirrors and plants around them.

By this, you can relax in front of a mirror because your eyes don’t meet other costumers, and you can look increased images of plants reflected in mirrors.

We try to create a new scenery of hair salon by an original placement of mirrors.

Project name: LE CINQ

Architect: YASUO IMAZU / ninkipen!
Use: hair salon

Location: Kadoma city, Osaka, Japan

Design: 2010.10〜2012.2
Construction: 2012.2〜2012.3

Scale: 219.5m2

Slideshow: none of the elongated rooms inside this curvy apartment block in Osaka are more than two metres wide.

Designed by Japanese architects Spacespace, the three-storey building folds around a narrow courtyard, while external staircases and balconies branch across from above.

These metal staircases provide direct access to four of the five apartments contained within the block.

A small shop is located on the ground floor and faces straight out towards the street.

You can also see another long and narrow building designed by Spacespace here.

Photography is by Koichi Torimura.

The text below was provided by the architects:

D-Apartment (Casa Kojiro)

Smooth configuration

This collective housing’s scale is intermediate position between detached housing and building.

This project site is situated on the west side of small station, a big 700-year-old camphor tree passing through the platform and the canopy.

The west side being mixed multiplicity of environmental-elements (bicycle-parking space, shrine, shops under the elevated, small street stand, etc) is more congested and lively than the east side being developed small station plaza and roundabout in order.

This project site having 5 borders is enclosed in too many elements, but the front road on the west side of this site facing 1st floor office and the elevated platform viewing to north, the sun to south are particularly important things.

So, I thought to design the building connecting these 3 elements smoothly.

Shapes and environment

Ordinarily collective housing for single family is 20-30㎡ in Japan.

This plan is composed of 4m×8m grid, and bathroom, lavatory, corridor and entrance occupy it’s large area.

So, living space is very small. Dwelling variation is made by only changing the wallpaper.

If dwelling unit is 2m×16m, this plan widen to only one side and become corridor like room.

Bathroom and bedroom is allocated on the end. This privacy area is hidden by bending the room shape, not getting the walls up.

Whole volume is consist of 2 rooms fit in 1floor×3layers. Allocating 2m wide wall-like volume along the border line of lot, and controlling the position of open-air stairs, generate the method of dwelling variation by it’s shapes and relation to environment.

Very thin courtyard generated by these process and open-air stairs are very comfortable space compared to ordinary open-air stairs of collective housing enclosed in neighbor buildings.

Windows are aligned by a pair (symmetrical to room center line) for ventilating and daylighting the courtyard through 2m volume.

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Imaginative power of anonymous plans

Many people will have some experience in apartment-hunting. We often encounter diversified plans. Some apartment has strangely huge balcony, and is labyrinthine, is extremely long.

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These fascinating aspects in particular to anonymous apartment plans are only discovering things for architects. I make an attempt to using imaginative power of anonymous plans for designing method. The possibility of generating new architecture is already in existence.

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Architects: SPACESPACE /Takanori Kagawa + Junko Kishigami
Structural design: OHNO JAPAN

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Constructor: PanaHome
Location: Osaka, Japan

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Program: collective housing + shop
Area: site161.72m2・floor240.16m2

Structure: steel・3stories
Date: December, 2011