This is a two-family home connecting two residential buildings with a corridor. The two houses, one set up according to the parents’ taste and the other in the taste of their child’s family, have contrasting styles in terms of their materials, forms, and colors. At the same time, they create “moderate integrity” in the adequate space kept outside and in a series of different scenes connected with the gardens and looking into the rooms.

The starting point for this design was the father’s sense of his attachment to a small hut to keep farm equipment. The essence of simple materials and forms can be felt in the moderate scales of the inside and outside as a background that creates a “landscape with a house and garden” in the yard with an old pine tree, orange and fig trees, sunlight, rain, snow, and wind.

We believe that the house’s “moderate integrity” and “landscape with a house and garden” are able to solve comprehensive problems, including communication recovery, the balance between life and environment, townscape development, and the inheritance of living culture, from the standpoint of architectural design. This will be gradually achieved with “growth” as a time factor.

Locally grown natural materials were used in a number of areas within the building. We aimed to create a healthy home by using cedar trees for the structural materials (beams and columns), Hiba trees from Noto for the wooden floor, diatomaceous earth and stone chippings in the hall, cedar clapboards for the outside walls, diatomaceous earth and Japanese handmade paper for the inside walls, traditional Komatsu tiles for the roof, and cedar roof boards for the rear of the eaves. We have also used traditional timber processing carried out by carpenters, rather than pre-cut processing, and wish for the house to include traditional timberwork and carpentry techniques.