YNAS uses timber-framed canopies to reconnect Japanese home with the outdoors
Local architecture studio YNAS has renovated and extended a traditional timber home in southern Japan, opening up its interiors and improving its connection to the surroundings with corrugated-metal canopies.
Named House in Miyakonojo, the extension was designed for a couple who, after raising their children and changing careers, decided to return to the wife's ancestral home in Miyakonojo to live with her father.
Originally built in 1978, the single-storey timber dwelling was structurally sound but suffered from a cramped internal layout and underutilised external spaces, which led to it feeling disconnected from the landscape and neighbouring community.
To address this, YNAS looked to open up the home's boundaries. The studio removed walls and hedges, deepened the existing engawa – or verandahs – with steel and timber canopies and created an outdoor kitchen space with views of the mountainous skyline.
"A major design directive was how to handle the varying distances between the family and the community," the studio's founder and principal architect, Yuko Numata, told Dezeen.
"Rather than simply closing off the home to protect privacy, I took the paradoxical approach of demonstrating through design that no physical borders were being created," she continued.
"Neighbours can catch distant glimpses of the family enjoying the outdoor kitchen or see smoke rising from the stove and the wood-fired bath. The house once again becomes a part of the landscape through the 'signs of life' it emits."
The original home had a traditional layout with rooms partitioned by sliding screens sitting off a dark, L-shaped corridor that separated the living area from the kitchen, dining room, and bedroom.
YNAS eliminated this corridor and the partition walls entirely, creating a unified living, dining and kitchen space, with zones demarcated by the structure's original timber columns and varied floor finishes.
New timber-framed canopies topped with corrugated metal shelter engawa spaces alongside the entrance, dining, and living areas to the south and the kitchen to the north.
These canopies extend House in Miyakonojo's unusually shallow eaves to provide vital shade, allowing the previously under-utilised spaces around its perimeter to become an extension of the interiors.
"We redefined the Japanese concept of ambiguous boundaries through floor materials. The kitchen, dining, and eave spaces are continuous mortar doma floors, strengthening the indoor-outdoor connection," Numata told Dezeen.
"Conversely, the living room and father's room utilise tatami mats made from authentic rush – igusa – from Kyushu. This allows the residents to feel a connection to the land even through the soles of their feet," she added.
Traditional features were re-introduced into the home's new spaces, including a kamado or wood-fired stove in the outdoor kitchen, an irori or sunken hearth in the indoor kitchen and a steel wood-fired bath in the wet room.
The firewood for these elements is stored in a low gabion wall made from local rubble, which replaced a hedge at the front of the home to help obscure views from the road into the living room.
To the northwest, a new timber-framed storage area is clad in corrugated polycarbonate sheets, fronted by another steel and timber canopy that shelters a parking and outdoor workshop space.
The home refresh was accompanied by a strategy to make it "self-sustaining", including adding solar panels on its roof and a rainwater harvesting system.
Elsewhere in Japan, architecture studio Aatismo recently overhauled a traditional timber-framed dwelling in Kamakura and Kuma&Elsa arranged Japanese apartments around translucent huts.
The photography is courtesy of YNAS.
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