Komi Family Residence (Mizumuraen) Retirement House

A retirement house in the north-east corner

The Komi Family Residence (Mizumuraen) Retirement House (小見家住宅（水村園）隠居屋, Komi-ke Jūtaku Inkyoya) is a 2-storey timber house for a retired head of the family, built in 1927 at the Mizumuraen tea shop in Honmachi, Takasaki City, Gunma Prefecture, and registered as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property on December 4, 2000.

It stands in the north-east corner of the lot and covers 36 square metres, the newest of the eight registered buildings. The plan is 4 Ken by 2 and a half ken under a north-south hipped Yosemune-zukuri roof. Upstairs are the retirement rooms, one of 8 tatami mats and one of 4 and a half. From the north-west end a corridor half a ken wide and 2 ken long juts westward, with a toilet at its far end on the upper floor.

The roofing is recorded inconsistently. The Agency for Cultural Affairs database lists galvanised sheet in its structure field but tiles in its written description, and the published sources do not settle which is correct today.

Why it was registered

The Komi Family Residence (Mizumuraen) Retirement House carries registration No. 10-0051 and is the only one of the eight listed as a model of design. The other seven qualified as buildings not easy to reproduce.

The Agency describes it as evidence of how living arrangements at Mizumuraen changed over time. The key is the New Zashiki at the far end of the lot, a storehouse-built parlour of 1906 said to have housed the shop's first master in retirement. Some 20 years later, in 1927, the family built retirement quarters of a different kind: a free-standing wooden house, set in the opposite corner.

From a fire-proofed room inside a storehouse to a timber house with its own upstairs rooms and toilet: in a little over 20 years, the place the household set aside for its elders changed completely, and these two buildings record the shift.

What to look for

The most telling feature of the Komi Family Residence (Mizumuraen) Retirement House is that life could be lived entirely upstairs. Two rooms of 8 and 4 and a half tatami were joined by a corridor leading to a toilet at the west end, an arrangement that reads as a way to spare an elderly occupant the stairs.

Because that corridor, half a ken wide and 2 ken long, juts out from the hipped main block, it shows on the outside as a slim projection, a small domestic touch on a lot otherwise given over to storehouses.

Among buildings of earth and brick, the Retirement House is the only timber one. That the last building added to the group was made for comfort rather than for fire resistance says something about how the household's priorities had moved on.

Visiting

The Komi Family Residence (Mizumuraen) Retirement House is a private residence behind a working tea shop and is not open to the public. Ask the shop about viewing or photography.

If you are invited into the lot, look up at the east side from the north end of the alley, where the upstairs rooms and the westward corridor can be traced from outside. Compare it with the New Zashiki at the south end to see how the family's retirement quarters evolved.