Saito Family Residence Middle Storehouse

A Taisho-Era Storehouse Across the Garden

The Saito Family Residence Middle Storehouse (齋藤家住宅中蔵, Saitō-ke Jūtaku Nakagura) is a 1921 plastered storehouse on the west side of the Saito family compound in Funatsucho, Sabae City, Fukui Prefecture, facing the main house across the garden, and was registered as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property on November 29, 2016, under number 18-0161. It is a 2-storey Dozo-zukuri building with a tiled roof and a building area of 89 square metres.

Its ridge runs north to south. On the east side, toward the house and garden, a lean-to roof (Geya) covers a work area in front of the doors. In 1936 the new storehouse was built against its north end, so the two now stand in a line along the western edge of the property.

Why It Was Registered

The Saito Family Residence Middle Storehouse was registered for contributing to the historic landscape of the country. What caught the attention of the Agency for Cultural Affairs is its split personality: the building wears two entirely different faces.

The west face is a traditional storehouse elevation, white Shikkui plaster above and a tall base of notched-batten weatherboarding below, the same treatment as the late Edo rice storehouse. The east face is finished in Araidashi, a washed mortar surface that exposes the aggregate, worked to look like cut stone.

By giving one face the old finish and the other a finish in modern mortar, the Saito Family Residence Middle Storehouse captures storehouse design in the middle of a transition.

What to Look For

Everything here comes down to the contrast between the two sides. The east face, turned toward the garden and the main house, got the new stone-effect finish. The family chose to put the modern look on the side they saw from home.

The west face keeps the old two-tone pattern of white wall over timber boarding. Compare it with the rice storehouse and you can see how little the traditional finish changed over roughly a century.

The new storehouse attached to the north carries the experiment further. Taken together, the Taisho and Showa storehouses trace how the Saito kept rethinking the look of their storehouses.

Visiting

The middle storehouse is privately owned, and Sabae City notes that the interior is not open. It stands on the west side of the plot behind the main house and cannot be seen from the public road.

In practice it is not a building you can view on site. The history of the compound and directions are on the Saito Family Residence page.