Kuma&Elsa arranges Japanese apartments around translucent "huts"
Architecture studio Kuma&Elsa has renovated the top two floors of an apartment block in Japan, creating enclosures that aim to re-create the spatial conditions of a traditional Japanese engawa.
Named Nakano House after its location in Nakano City, the project was completed for a client who wanted to re-create the feeling of her traditional childhood home 15-metres above ground on the top two floors of a concrete apartment block.
To achieve this, Kuma&Elsa inserted a central hut on each floor, creating a space around its perimeter that opens onto balconies. This house-in-a-house approach replicated the feel of a traditional Japanese veranda space known as an engawa.
"The project involves the design of two apartments: one for the client on the sixth floor and one for the family of one of her sons on the seventh floor," founders Shohei Kuma and Elsa Escobedo told Dezeen.
"In both cases, we introduced a 'hut' at the centre of each floor," they continued. 'Around these volumes, we defined an engawa as a residual – negative – space."
"However, the boundaries of the huts are not fixed; they can extend and connect different areas, forming a continuous living environment across each floor," they added.
The hut in the centre of each floor was constructed using a simple steel frame, which was fixed to the apartment block's concrete floor plates and braced to the ceiling with steel cables.
Translucent, sliding screens of plastic framed in timber allow the bedrooms and living spaces inside to be opened-up to the surrounding area, where the bathrooms, kitchen and dining spaces are located.
The wooden flooring of the hut interiors extends out to form a perimeter mimicking a traditional timber engawa, with a zigzagging edge where it meets the surrounding concrete floor.
Timber shutters and curtains screen the surrounding windows, which incorporate sliding glass doors to access balconies on the building's southern side.
Atop the huts, their fire-resistant plasterboard roofs have been left purposefully unfinished, an approach that was also used for the rough plastered walls of the bathroom.
"The idea of leaving certain elements deliberately unfinished, allowing them to evolve over time, emerged through dialogue with the client and her family," Kuma and Escobedo told Dezeen.
"As the site is a recent apartment rather than an older building, it lacks pre-existing elements or surfaces marked by age and patina," they continued. "This sense of 'incompleteness' therefore introduces a temporal dimension into the project."
Other homes in Japan recently featured on Dezeen include House in Takahatayama by HYG Architects, which features stepped floors and curved ceilings designed to mimic the undulating landscape of the surrounding neighbourhood.
The photography is by Shohei Kuma.
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