Sendai 山间“horizontal house”

Architect：Kazuya Saito Architects

Location：Sendai, Miyagi Prefecture, Japan; | ;

Project Year：2015

Category：Shops;Private Houses

It is a steeled house with shop consisted of “1 core”, “2 volumes”, and “3 stories”.

Miyagino, located 1.5 km east of Sendai station, is the active area packed with sports facilities such as a baseball stadium and general athletic park. The site has a frontage of 8 m and a depth of 11 m. There used to be a two-story wooden house as a Tofu shop owned by a client’s grandfather, so the clients were living in this house and running a cafe. Because the house became old and the clients expected new family members, they requested a rebuilding of two-family dwelling combined with a cafe shop.

The surrounding area used to be a shopping street, so a row of narrow buildings remains as the trace of the old days. If we piled up the requested floor space from clients while setting the height at 9 m to relax the legal limitation, the house would be a huge volume and out of accord with its surroundings. Therefore, we divided it into two long narrow volumes to achieve harmony with the surrounding. The east side of the volume is 2.7 m cantilevered to secure a parking space. Thick exterior wall designed with a Tofu motif is finished by an elastic plastering. The thickness of the wall can conceal facility equipment in it, and avoid direct sunlight and rainwater instead of eaves.

The interior is a skip-floor structure combining high-ceiled 2 floors and low-ceiled 3 floors. Whereas cafe and dining where people stay for a long time face the south so that those spaces become expansive and bright, bedroom and water section are calm and quiet with the low-ceiling. That difference modulates the space of the house.

The core connecting 2 volumes has multiple functions, such as the flow continuing from the entrance to the terrace, the path of wind and daylight for the whole house, and the structure supporting a cantilever. While securing the independence of each room, connection of the core to each room gently expands the living spaces sequentially. We hopefully could actualize here a breezy and multidimensional living way like a horizontal house hollowed on mountains.

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