Hasta La Ideas

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