This private house was built originally in 1991 and is situated in Ōmachi, an area in the historical city of Kamakura in the Kanagawa Prefecture. Placed on a hillside, the building is surrounded by nature, resulting in beautiful landscapes in every direction faced at.
Project Name: Kamakura House
Studio Name: Roovice
Lead Architect: Koichi Takahashi
Text by: Michele Sandrin
Edited by: Giulia Taverna
Before the renovation, the kitchen, the living and the Japanese-style rooms were all divided in their own enclosed area. This division spoiled the efficiency of the floorplan and created a complicated circulation inside.
Therefore, the modernisation started by removing the separating wall between the living and tatami rooms on the first floor. By doing so a spacious kitchen and living room that covers the whole north-south direction of the plan were shaped. An island has been installed near to the south-end of the kitchen, converting the previous kitchen area into a hobby confectionery with a smooth rounded plaster board facing the counter, to improve the flow inside.
The new counter is covered with the typical 10x10cm white tile from the Japanese modern era, giving a touch of nostalgia amid the refurbished space. The size of the island was designed to provide a secondary dining spot for the owners and it soon became the center for the family’s life.
Thanks to the new setup, plenty of natural light gets inside the plan through the wide openings along the western wall. This allowed us to wall the two windows in the south end, in favor of a kitchen shelf.
Given the considerable size of the house and the limited budget available, the renovation prioritized those spaces needing the most while trying to blend old and new harmonically.In order to achieve this, the age of the house had to be visible, so the ceiling in the living room has been dismantled to expose the wooden structure. To match the texture and tone of the timber, large-sized tiles were chosen for the flooring. With their peculiar reflective surface similar to water they work in synergy with the surrounding and add even more light to the areas.
The modernisation brought the biggest changes to the previous first floor Japanese-style room: beside its materiality which has been homogenized to the rest of the living, the storage became part of the space, widening the ambience by a lot. The sun room (内縁 Uchien) in the inner engawa gained a bookshelf from the former storage. Now it’s used as a creative place of the house when closed behind the original Yukimi Shoji (雪見障子, lit. translated as “snow-watching shoji”).
A different approach characterized the upper level renovation where the existing well-preserved conditions required only some minimal changes. The toilet received a wooden pavement to match the existing one in the hallway and the other bedrooms. In the studio in the south-west corner of the plan the owners made the flooring entirely DIY with a woven texture. At last, the sliding doors in the Japanese-style bedroom were replaced with darker tone ones to better match the materiality of the rest.
