Two Houses in Tokyo

There are two houses in a quiet residential area with verdant greenery. One is unemori's own house and the other is his sister-in-law`s family. While the two families wanted to live independently, they also wished to support one another and desired to establish a common space such as a garden and atelier to enjoy a lifestyle that allows for a sense of expansion that is difficult to achieve as a single household.

We divided a piece of land in the longitudinal direction and built a narrow house on each side. Between the two houses is an alley that is about 16 meters long and 1.8 meters wide and acts as an approach to the two houses. The alley is as a passage garden and a buffer zone that helps to maintain an appropriate distance between the two families.

With a tent that expands above and plants and a water basin, the alley allows members of each family to come and go directly without having to enter through their respective entrances. This space aims to be a vague intermediary zone that acts as part of the interior while also belonging to the outdoors.

Each building is a continuous space that acts as a single room that has various floor and roof levels. The roof level was carefully adjusted to allow for privacy, views, light into the rooms and alley, and ventilation. We also installed many windows in different directions.The house is a single large room that looks up to the sky, having views of each other’s wall surface and terrace across the alley, and containing both light and dark as it connects smaller spaces of various sizes. This convex-concave and irregular space was built using plural timber keel beams that are installed in the longitudinal direction. Extensible space makes our sense of life grow and expands beyond the physical area. Our goal is to create an environmental coherence by gathering small places together.