Contemporary residential architecture in Japan is, in turns, seemingly unlivable for the average person (see: house without interior walls), and a mind-expanding exercise in suspending your disbelief that the structure at hand is a place of residence at all.
So it's rare when photos of a newly revamped home surface and reveal an updated, thoroughly modern space that also embraces its traditional architectural elements.
Just outside Kyoto, local firm CASE-REAL masterminded the renovation of this house, purchased by a couple—a creative director in the food world and a gallerist—who wanted to preserve the historic aspects of the home while expanding and updating it for modern life.
The result is a home where the original structure's whitewashed interiors remain accented by exposed, dark-timber structural framing elements and a sleek, two-story addition that, though it's all clean lines and slick surfaces, doesn't dispel with the past altogether.
The brand-new extension makes way for a combined tea and dining room painted a plummy shade of purple, with light-wood floors and ceilings. It all opens up to a sparsely planted rear garden on the site.
∙ CASE-REAL renovates and extends a traditional japanese dwelling in kyoto [Designboom]
∙ Wild Japanese House Has Holes All Over It [Curbed]
∙ All Japan coverage [Curbed]
∙ All Renovations coverage [Curbed]