Yamauchi Family Residence Detached Wing

A guest wing of 1926

The Yamauchi Family Residence Detached Wing (山内家住宅離れ, Yamauchi-ke Jūtaku Hanare) is a Japanese-style house of 1926 in the Irino district of Doi-cho, Shikokuchuo City, Ehime Prefecture, listed as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property on July 25, 2011. It is timber-framed, covers 211 square meters, and is single-storey except for a two-storey section.

Hanare means a building set apart from the main house, which usually suggests something modest. This one is not. It occupies a site on the south side of the road and faces east, with the entrance pushed forward at the center of that front. South of the entrance the house is single-storey; north of it, two. The roofs are Irimoya-zukuri, tiled in Sangawara-buki pantiles.

The ground floor holds eight rooms in two rows of four. Farmhouses of the period more often set four rooms in a square; here the rooms run in files, one behind another, with a veranda (Engawa) carried around the outside. The front room on the west side has the formal alcove fittings that mark a space kept for receiving guests.

The Agency for Cultural Affairs describes the house as modern Japanese-style domestic architecture and singles out the timber. Meiboku, choice stock chosen for grain, color and the placement of its knots, went into the posts and ceiling boards, and carpenters who understood such material did the work.

The name comes from the Yamauchi family. Matsukaze Hospital, on the adjoining land, records in its own history that its first director opened the Yamauchi Clinic here in 1924, and keeps a page of photographs of the Yamauchi family buildings. The Detached Wing went up two years later. No owner is recorded in the Agency for Cultural Affairs database, so the present arrangement cannot be confirmed from the public record.

Why the building is on the register

The Yamauchi Family Residence Detached Wing carries registration number 38-0096, announced in the seventieth round of listings on July 25, 2011; the storehouse beside it took the next number, 38-0097. One criterion was applied: that the building contributes to the historic character of the national landscape.

Houses of this type went up across Japan in the closing years of Taisho and the opening years of Showa. They hold to the older plan, organised around a formal reception room, while taking in the materials and fittings that the decade had to offer. The Registered Tangible Cultural Property system has absorbed a great many of them.

At 211 square meters this is not a large house by national standards. The interest lies in the execution: a plan tidied into two rows of four, a veranda taken right around, roofs set at different heights north and south. None of that is unusual on its own. Bringing it together without a seam is the difficult part.

What can be read from outside

The interior of the Yamauchi Family Residence Detached Wing is closed, but the massing gives a good deal away.

Start with the roofs. The single-storey south range sits low; the two-storey north range rises behind it; the entrance porch steps forward between them under a roof of its own. Three heights meet at the front and the silhouette climbs in stages. Where the low roof meets the tall one, the gable end of the Irimoya-zukuri roof turns toward the viewer.

Then the veranda, which does more than it appears to. Ringing eight rooms with an Engawa gives the household a way to cross the building without passing through occupied rooms, so guests and family need never share a route. The alcove fittings in the west front room suggest that visitors were received there.

The timber is the part no one can check from the road. On that point the Agency for Cultural Affairs record has to stand in for direct observation.

Visiting the Yamauchi Family Residence Detached Wing

The Yamauchi Family Residence Detached Wing is privately owned and closed. The interior is not open and the grounds cannot be entered. Because the house stands back from the road and faces east, even the outside is only partly visible from public ground: expect the roofs rather than the elevations.

The Yamauchi Family Residence Storehouse next door sits right on the road, and its plaster relief can be studied properly. Anyone walking to see both should give the storehouse the greater share of the time.

Photography should stay within what is visible from the road. Houses and a medical facility stand around the site. Do not aim a camera over walls, through gateways or at windows.

Iyo-Doi Station on the JR Yosan Line is the nearest, about 1 kilometer to the northeast, or roughly 13 minutes on foot. By car the site lies about 4 kilometers west of the Doi Interchange on the Matsuyama Expressway. There is no visitor parking.

Questions about the listing, or about any future opening, go to the cultural properties section of the Shikokuchuo City Board of Education, on 0896-28-6043.