CROSSHING NAKADA

At the center of Hida-Takayama, a town known for its craftsmanship, an 80-year-old wooden house stood on a narrow lot sandwiched between the Hon-machi shopping street and the Miyagawa River. This gut-renovation project began with a request from the client, who wanted to bring the house she had grown up in back to life as a second home between here and Tokyo, and, if possible, to make it something the townspeople could use easily too, as a gallery or event space.

As one would expect of a building on a shopping street, both side walls are entirely without openings; the front faces the street, so large openings and balconies could only be placed on the east side, facing the Miyagawa River. For all that it is a machiya, a traditional townhouse, it has no inner courtyard, and its old-fashioned floor plan, cut into small, closed-off rooms, left most of the house cut off from its surroundings. Our goal was to bring the house back to life as a channel for natural light and wind, and to create an open, flexible space suited to our sociable client's way of living.

We demolished most of the ground floor, where the structural members had deteriorated and seismic strength was a real concern, and reinforced it properly, laying out the plan with the greatest possible care so that the seismic walls this required would not compromise the spatial continuity and flow of the whole house. Ordinarily, the void running through the house links everything into one open space; close the sliding doors, tucked away and inconspicuous, and each room becomes its own. It is a house built to answer to whatever is asked of it, a private life, a gathering of many guests, or, with privacy assured, use as a rented space for third parties, simply with a few flips and slides of the doors.

Most of the interior walls and ceilings are finished in a stable, ready-mixed plaster, relatively easy to apply. This unitary finish applied throughout the house successfully gives the house the unity the client wanted. Due to cost constraints, we ended up doing most of the 200m2 plastering work by ourselves. To meet the client's wish to keep living comfortably, we stayed on site night after night through a Takayama winter, when the air outside drops below freezing, working alone with a trowel late into the night. We came to this plastering out of necessity, but learning its rewards and its difficulty in our own hands turned out, looking back, to be one of our great assets.

When part of the second-floor ceiling was removed, an old, rough but beautiful earthen wall appeared beneath it. We left it as it was, framing it in plaster rather than covering it over: not making everything new, but drawing out what the building already had. We made extensive use of raw, low-cost materials that could be left as finished, blackened rolled steel for the stairs and door frames, straw panels for fittings and walls, while directing more of the budget toward good products in the places hands and eyes touch every day, switches, faucet fittings. In the kitchen, where we packed the household functions into a compact space, we pulled the wall cabinets forward as open, visible storage, hid the refrigerator inside a wall, and folded the range hood into a plain, unfussy box, keeping the room easy to use without looking cluttered. Everything we saved through careful cost control went to the countertop and the fittings, the parts people actually see.

With more than a decade past since its completion, the client keeps enjoying her life in this house with evident care, using the ground floor as a rented space and playing her own part in revitalizing the town she calls home. Being our first project, it taught us how much it matters to build something people will go on living in with real affection. Knowing what to cut and where to spend: this small renovation holds one of the origins of how we still work today.