Studio: IHRMK
Client: Private
Year: 2021
Type: Private House
Location: Ishioka, Ibaraki, Japan
Builder: Gunji Kenchiku Kogyosho
Status: Completed
Photographer: CHIBA Kenya
Publications: architecturephoto.net
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We were commissioned to renovate a slightly run-down tatami-covered living room and a kitchen/dining room in a house located in Ishioka City, Ibaraki Prefecture. As the children had moved out and the husband had retired, the owners were spending more time at home. The first request was to adjust the layout so that the kitchen becomes a place not just for the couple to cook but also to encourage them to have conversations.
They also wanted to renovate a part of the house into a comfortable space for everyone to relax when their children and grandchildren are visiting as well as for the couple to use daily. When we visited the site, we saw a sizeable one-story house built using traditional construction methods, surrounded by the owners’ farming fields.
Seeing the husband talk about his fondness for wiring and plumbing work, the wife talk about their daily life, and the gentle aging of the walls that make up the rooms, we felt that we did not want to make a drastic intervention. Our design was not to do a dramatic “remodeling” that changes the space entirely or a “refurbishing”* that limits itself in improving the equipment and fittings.
Instead, we wanted to do a “repair” that nurtures the existing atmosphere. We aimed to feature something that exists between the scope of refurbishing and remodeling* without picking too much on the subtext of the old and the new. It was executed by exposing the original finishes as much as possible, adding new materials and finishes without artificially aging or coloring them, and not using the differences as an architectural vocabulary.
Like the metabolism of a cell, the history of a place is formed through new layers lapping over the old layers. Interventions such as the demolition of the walls that separated the living room from the kitchen, the treatment to fill the holes of the beams on the columns, the day bed bench that reuses the bay window where a TV and telephone had been carelessly placed, the kitchen island counter facing the living room, the gentle concrete stairs approaching the kitchen entrance, or the insulation added under the floor and on the exterior walls may be a collection of small alterations.
However, they are built on the history of the house, and they are part of the dialogue between the house with the present and even with the future. The project was what reminded us that presenting strong concepts and spatiality or finding the raison d’etre that architects tend to obsess over, must come after such dialogues.
Silver Linings
Due to the construction company having problems with a different project, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the client living in the house during the construction, the process took much longer than anticipated. It was scheduled to begin in September and be completed in November, but unfortunately, we could not meet the client’s wish to finish construction before the cold weather set in.
As a compromise, we decided to make a temporary living unit by using the carport for farm equipment adjacent to the main house, enclosing it with corrugated polycarbonate, and placing a kitchen counter removed from the house. The construction was finally completed in June of the following year. With interruptions in between, the construction period eventually ballooned to ten months.
Although this was, in some ways, a failure, it allowed s new history to be carved into the small shed. Thus even after completing the home, the shed functions as an “annex” to relax inbetween farm work. The couple continues to live here peacefully while growing crops.
*Following the terminology in the Japanese used-housing market, we define “refurbishing” as the improvement of mainly deteriorated equipment and surface finishes, and “remodeling” as the renewal of the spatial composition that extends to finishes, equipment, and sometimes the structure.