Charred-timber cladding is contrasted with warm plywood-lined interiors at House in Mibu, a home in Tochigi Prefecture, Japan, completed by local studio Tato Architects.
The 108-square-metre home was designed for a couple and their three children in the backyard of the client’s parental home, tucked off a residential street in the town of Mibu.
As the site needed to accommodate access to an existing garage and workshop, Kobe-based Tato Architects aimed to balance “enclosure and openness” in its design.
According to the studio, this is reflected in the final layout where the first floor overhangs on one side, and the ground floor is sunk 500 millimetres below ground and partially topped with a sloped green roof.
“The core concept is what Dutch architect Aldo van Eyck called the ‘in-between’ – a realm where enclosure and openness are experienced at once,” studio founder Yo Shimada told Dezeen.
“The challenge was to add a whole house without making the yard feel crowded or cutting off the life already flowing through it. Rather than treating these as constraints, we let them shape the building,” Shimada continued.
“We sank the living room into the ground and planted its roof with grass: sinking into the earth encloses, touching the earth opens, and the two appear as faces of a single operation.”
House in Mibu is entered beneath the overhang of the first floor, where a welcome area with a cloakroom and bathroom steps down into a sunken living, dining and kitchen area.
Full-height windows wrap this lower space to the west, aiming to emphasise its close relationship to the ground while offering views into the neighbouring workshop.
A pair of timber and green-painted steel staircases lead up through a rectilinear void to the home’s first floor, where the bedrooms are organised on either side of a raised, loft-like space that can serve as a study or guest room.
The lines of sight created by these stepped levels define the home’s interiors, along with walls and ceilings lined entirely in lauan plywood, which Shimada chose for its ability to “record use and age gracefully”.
“Sitting in the living room, the ground of the garden spreads out almost at eye level, so family members working in the yard and those inside exchange glances across a slight shift in height,” Shimada explained.
“The first floor is the counterpart: a nest-like composition of small rooms – three children’s rooms and a bedroom – linked by two staircases, with a loft raised 690 millimetres above the floor that connects the rooms and doubles as a desk or a place to sleep.”
Outside, the home is clad in planks of charred cedar and finished with a corrugated metal roof, chosen to nod to the character of the workshop building.
Other homes in Japan recently completed by Tato Architects include a dwelling with similarly open interiors and silver-painted ceilings that help maximise daylight on a compact plot, and a skinny home that is combined with a ceramics studio.
The photography is courtesy of Tato Architects.
Estudio EA