Okumura Family Residence Detached Wing

A Taishō room grafted onto a row of storehouses

Okumura Family Residence Detached Wing (奥村家住宅離れ, Okumurake Jūtaku Hanare) is a Taishō-era detached room at 395 Higashikoken in Inuyama City, Aichi Prefecture, registered as a Tangible Cultural Property on 23 August 1999. It stands at the western end of the inner zone of the Okumura plot, built directly against the tool storehouse, and the Agency for Cultural Affairs dates it to 1912-1925.

This is the youngest of the six Okumura buildings described on this site by some sixty years. The Main House and the rice storehouse are late Edo, the safe storehouse, the tool storehouse and the barn are Meiji, and this one belongs to the short Taishō era. Reading the plot from east to west is close to reading it in chronological order.

Construction is timber, two storeys, tiled roof, building area 37 square metres, and the manner is sukiya-fū: the loose, tea-house-derived residential idiom in which exposed timber is slender, finishes are understated and the room opens toward a garden. Against a wall of thick storehouse plaster, that is a deliberate change of key.

How the compound grew, recorded in one building

The Agency's assessment of Okumura Family Residence Detached Wing describes it as a structure that shows how the household's compound developed over time. That judgement is doing a lot of work in one sentence, and it explains why a small Taishō room sits on the register alongside Edo-period storehouses.

The evidence is in how the wing meets its neighbour. The eastern part of the building is left as an earth floor, and the entrance is taken from the right-hand side of the kuramae, the covered forecourt in front of the tool storehouse door. The detached wing did not get its own approach. It was attached to the circulation that already existed, which is exactly what a later addition to a working compound does.

West of the earth floor is an eight-mat room with verandas on both the south and north sides. On the north the veranda projects further as a slatted deck in the manner of a tsukimidai, a platform for viewing the moon. A merchant house of the Edo period would not have spent its inner ground this way. By the Taishō years the Okumura family could afford a room whose purpose was pleasure rather than trade, and they placed it at the far end of the plot where the storehouses stop.

Registration number 23-0029 was granted under the criterion for structures serving as a model of their type. With the rice storehouse and the tool storehouse, this building is treated by the Agency as one of the three principal components of the inner zone.

What to look at

The junction with the tool storehouse is the thing to see. On one side, plaster walls half a metre thick built to stop fire; on the other, thin posts and paper. The two touch. Nothing mediates between them, and the abruptness is the whole point, because it lets you see the moment the Okumura family stopped building for storage and started building for living.

Then take the north veranda. The slatted deck projects beyond the line of the building, which is a structural nuisance and an aesthetic decision, and it faces the garden rather than the working yard. Sit at that edge and the sightline runs away from every storehouse on the property.

The eight-mat room itself is modest in scale. Sukiya work rewards close looking rather than distant impression: the grain chosen for a post, the width of a veranda board, the height at which a rail is set. Okumura Family Residence Detached Wing is small enough that these decisions are the entire architecture.

Visiting Okumura Family Residence Detached Wing

The plot is privately owned and trades as French Okumuratei, a restaurant and ceremony venue. Okumura Family Residence Detached Wing stands deep in the inner zone and is not visible from the public road, so seeing it means entering the grounds as a booked guest. The operator states that on wedding days the detached wing serves as the couple's waiting room, which means it is regularly closed to other visitors.

There is no admission charge and no separate building tour. The operator publishes hours of 11:00 to 21:00, closing on Tuesdays other than public holidays, with lunch bookings preferred and dinner bookings required, and asks that visitors telephone ahead since the site may be shut when no reservations are held. Checked 30 August 2026. Because this particular building is used for private functions, anyone hoping to see it specifically should say so when booking rather than assume access.

Meitetsu Inuyama Station is roughly five minutes' walk to the west along the old road. There is parking at the Yosaka junction corner. Photography inside the grounds should be cleared with the staff.