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Architects: Yutarou Ohta
- Area: 98 m²
- Year: 2022
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Photographs:Takashi Uemura
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Lead Architect: Yutaro Ohta
Text description provided by the architects. Renovation of a private house deep in the mountains of Gunma Prefecture. The house is for a young couple who moved from the city. They chose to renovate a 60-year-old two-story wooden house because they wanted to enjoy their life in this area more than its performance since their life in the area is limited. Although deep in the mountains, the house was surrounded by dense greenery and was dimly lit even in the daytime due to the short distance between neighboring buildings in the residential area.
To maximize the use of natural light, the upper floor of the living room was demolished to create an atrium space. Light poured in like a high sidelight from the windows of the room that was originally on the second floor. A new two-story wall was built along the atrium. The wall has several openings, and the space that used to be a closet was turned into a front space facing the stairwell.
The stairwell was constructed using fixtures that had been used in the house, stripped to their original surfaces. The fittings in the house were scanned in 3D using Lidar. Even in a small house, there are fixtures of various sizes, and by randomly layering the various base configurations, I created an "object" that functions as a wall, a handrail, and a fixture.
The base of the fittings was very uneven, with some clean and some rough, so we decided to apply a pastel green. The pastel green created an image of new green after the renovation, as opposed to the dense green before the renovation. The atrium space, surrounded by fixture objects filled with natural light, brings the history of the house to live as a shadow.
