PC Garden House in Japan by Kengo Kuma.

Who feels like a cool drink of water? I felt like I’d had one after looking at Mitsumasa Fujitsuka’s photos of this beautiful Kengo Kuma house. It’s a littler, newer, Katsura. Spare Japanese perfection, just enough brush strokes to render a completely captivating scene.

Something about the way the deep eaves and deeper running-board of the house penetrate the garden gives the impression that the rooms inside and the space outside is in perfect coalescence. Like Elding Oscarson’s Mölle house covered earlier, this building has a pinwheel form, describing little external courtyards and creates views from one part of the house into another, rendering the space that little bit more complex and making the house seem a little bit larger.

Inside, it’s spare and beautiful. Considered arrangements of timber boards to the walls, ceilings, and floors of some rooms give way to plain pavers and plasterboard in others. The structural members are a crisp black. Something about the way the rafters offer a little triangular peep at the edge of the eaves undoes me (we’ll be seeing that detail in my own house when I get around to it!).

And done. This sort of simplicity is the most complicated of all to achieve. This house in many ways matches the description of mediocre bungalows that dot our cities. And yet it is light years removed in terms of its resolution and execution. Beautiful.

Ende.

Text by Luke Moloney for Yellowtrace.

[Images courtesy of Kengo Kuma & Associates. Photography by Mitsumasa Fujitsuka.]