Iinuma Honke Detached Annex

A Guest Wing Off the Main House

Iinuma Honke Detached Annex is a guest wing of about 1940 in the Umabashi district of Shisui, Chiba Prefecture, listed as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property on 27 October 2017.

A corridor links it to the south-east corner of the main house. It is a single-storey wooden building with a tiled roof and a floor area of 86 square metres, roofed in the Irimoya-zukuri hipped-and-gabled form with Sangawara-buki pantiles. Two reception rooms, one of 10 mats and one of 8, sit side by side inside a wrapping veranda, and a tea room projects from the south-east corner.

Building a separate wing for receiving guests was something prosperous merchant and landholding families did as a matter of course in the modern period. Iinuma Honke Detached Annex belongs to that habit: a brewing family's room for visitors, set slightly apart from the house it serves.

Two Opposite Manners Under One Roof

Iinuma Honke Detached Annex was listed under the criterion for buildings that contribute to the historic landscape. What the listing rewards is the pairing of two very different treatments in a single small building.

The 10-mat room carries the full set of formal fittings: an alcove, staggered shelves beside it and a built-in writing bay. The Agency for Cultural Affairs describes the work as restrained and made from choice timber, which in practice means straight-grained members and thin, disciplined lines, exactly as the shoin manner prescribes.

The tea room at the south-east corner does the opposite. It uses bent timber with the bark left on, so that posts and lintels keep the curve the tree grew with. Formality in one room, deliberate roughness in the next, a few steps apart. By around 1940, when this wing went up, that taste had long since travelled from the cities to established country houses like this one.

What to Look For

From outside, the roof gives the building away. Against the low single-storey run of the main house, Iinuma Honke Detached Annex shows a hipped-and-gabled end. Its tiled surface is smaller than the main roof, yet the ridge curve is stronger.

The small projection at the south-east corner is the tea room. Because the veranda wraps the reception rooms, the plan never settles into a plain rectangle; it turns once at the corner, and that turn is what gives the elevation its shadows.

At 86 square metres, this is the smallest of the six listed buildings apart from the gate and wall. The figure sounds modest, but rooms of 10 and 8 mats are ample for the job of receiving guests.

Visiting

The brewery publishes no arrangement for going inside Iinuma Honke Detached Annex, and the booked brewery tour does not include it. Treat it as an exterior-only building.

Walking round to the south-east side of the main house brings the roof and the gable end into view, though the ground there falls within the restaurant's working area, so follow the signs on the site. If you need a definite answer about access, ask at the shop, Kinoene Magariya, on 043-496-1001. Directions to the estate and opening hours are set out on the Iinuma Honke page.