Tato Architects / Yo Shimada

House in Shichiku

Location／Kita-ku, Kyoto, Japan
Principal use／Private residence
Family／Couple + cat

Design

Tato Architects
Team／Yo Shimada, Ayumi Morimoto

Structural engineer

tmsd Takashi Manda Structural Design
Team／Takashi Manda, Moeka Magari, Hideki Oda

Curtains

fabricscape
Team／Kiyohiko Yamamoto

Construction

Juki

Structure

Main structure　Timber, conventional post-and-beam construction
Foundation　Mat slab foundation

Scale

2 storeys above ground
Eaves height　4,882 mm　Maximum height　6,615 mm
Site area　163.30 ㎡
Building footprint　 57.96 ㎡（building coverage ratio 35.50%　permitted 60%）
Total floor area　108.49 ㎡（floor area ratio 66.44%　permitted 100%）
1st floor　54.74 ㎡　2nd floor　53.75 ㎡

Completion

2026

Reflection and Margins

Can a house, while responding to the singularity of its site, move beyond a one-off solution and be elevated into a form that others might repeat? On the constricted sites of the city, the pursuit of a rational optimum within limited conditions risks letting design run ahead of the inhabitants — pre-emptively plucking away both their active discovery of place and the potential for renewal that redundancy should afford. Architecture should not be subordinate to daily life; it should simply be, as autonomous geometry. Within the margins of that form, inhabitants find their places after the fact. This reversal of order, we believed, is what could give depth and redundancy to a small dwelling.

The site is a flag-shaped lot in Kyoto, at the end of an alley less than two metres wide, where the client’s childhood home once stood. To preserve as much as possible of the garden and its trees that had grown alongside that home, a simple rectangular plan was set at an angle to the site. Because the volume avoids facing the neighbouring houses head-on, wedge-shaped margins emerge at the four corners, each becoming a garden of distinct character — differing in how the sun enters and how deep the space extends. To draw the gaze toward these gardens and push the presence of the neighbours out of awareness, the ceiling height was suppressed in place of deep eaves. Its height, 2,020 mm, was determined by the dimensions of off-the-shelf aluminium windows. This low ceiling, fixed by such a matter-of-fact rationale, was painted silver and turned into a reflective surface. The dully gleaming ceiling lets the light and leaf-shadows streaming in from the four gardens, and the traces of the exterior, seep into the interior. The physical plane transforms into a phenomenon whose boundaries are no longer certain.

At the centre of the plan, a void resembling a reduced outline of the site is carved out, giving vertical release to the low-ceilinged space. Spanning this void on the upper floor is a large table, 2.4 metres square. This surface — which could equally be a dining table, a desk, or a worktable — loosely links the bedrooms and the bathroom while leaving its use undefined: another margin, as it were. The two levels, close enough that an outstretched hand can reach the floor above, are nevertheless layered as separate worlds through shifted plan compositions and materials: the ground floor an abstract space of silver ceiling and mortar floor, the upper floor a tangible space of lauan-plywood floors and ceilings that follow the gabled roof. Awareness shifts with every ascent and descent. Furthermore, on the ground floor the interior walls follow the site boundaries — which derive from the orthogonal grid of the city’s ancient jōbō planning — while only the exterior walls are rotated. These interior walls and the void conform to the order of the city; the exterior walls deviate from it. Depending on where one places one’s awareness, the perception of the space wavers — and the ceiling’s reflection, now a phenomenon, amplifies that oscillation.

What this house attempts is a form composed of reflection and margins. Born as a response to the conditions of an individual site, it aspires to be a set of operations that can be repeated away from that site. The inhabitants discover their own places not from the uses that room names dictate, but in the interstice between geometry and phenomenon.