Horie Family Residence (Yoshida Village, Iishi District,

Horie Family Residence: An Izumo Farmhouse Built Around One Great Hall

The Horie Family Residence stands in Mintani, a small settlement in the Yoshida district of Unnan City, near the line where Shimane meets Hiroshima. The main house measures 19.2 meters across the front and 8.6 meters deep, under a steep hip roof of thatch. Carpenters raised it in the eighteenth century for a family of working farmers, and it has come down to us as one of the clearest surviving examples of how ordinary houses were built in the old Izumo country.

What sets it apart is not decoration but structure. Half the floor plan is bare earth, the other half a single broad hall, and the timber frame that holds that hall open is the reason carpenters and historians keep returning to study it.

The Family and the House

By the family's own account the Horie were of samurai stock. Their first recorded ancestor, Seizaemon, is said to have settled at Nakanosako in Yoshida village in 1574, and the tenth head of the line, Goemon, is remembered as the one who moved the household to its present site at Mintani during the Anei era (1772–1781).

The building's age has been read in two ways. The Agency for Cultural Affairs dates it to roughly the first half of the eighteenth century. An ink inscription found on a tie-beam tenon in the front room records the year as Anei 3, or 1774, which fits the tradition that the family arrived in the same decade. Either reading places the house firmly in the middle Edo period.

Why It Is an Important Cultural Property

Japan designated the residence an Important Cultural Property on 20 June 1969. The reasoning was straightforward: this is a textbook case of the everyday farmhouse of the Izumo region, neither grand nor altered beyond recognition, with its working earthen-floored half unusually well kept.

Floor plans of this kind are known as the hiroma type, organized around a large living hall. The Horie house is valued as an early, almost prototype version of that plan, the sort of building later farmhouses would refine. Because so few modest rural houses of this date survive in good condition, the example carries weight out of proportion to its size.

What to Look For

The house faces west, and you enter on the north side through a large sliding door, the oodo, set into the wall by the stable bay. The northern half of the interior is doma, a packed-earth floor split between the maya (the stall once kept for the family's horse) and a wide working space called the usu-niwa. Stepping in from daylight, you notice first how much of a farmhouse was given over to work rather than living.

The raised floor lies to the south. Here two rooms, the nando (inner room) and the omote (formal front room), sit side by side east and west, and beyond them runs a great hall that uses the full depth of the building. The omote keeps several older features worth pausing over: a veranda-like irikawa along its front, a built-in cupboard, and an oshi-ita board where a tokonoma alcove would later develop.

The great hall is the heart of the design, and opening it up was no small engineering problem. Rather than break the space with a row of posts, the builders ran heavy beams parallel to the ridge beneath the main frame, then pitched raking beams, the nobori-bari, up from the outer geya posts to meet them. This raised-beam framing carries the roof while leaving the hall clear, and it is the single feature that most distinguishes the house.

The thatched roof asks for its own kind of attention. After a thorough dismantling and reassembly in the Heisei years returned the house to its original form, a seasonal safeguard was added: through the snow-heavy winters of this mountain valley, temporary log props are set around the eaves to take the weight of accumulated snow. A visit in January looks quite different from one in summer.

Around the House: The Heartland of Tatara Iron

Yoshida-cho is better known for iron than for farmhouses, and the connection is worth following. For centuries this valley produced steel by the tatara method, smelting iron sand and charcoal in a clay furnace, and it remains the richest place in Japan to see how that work was done.

A short drive away is Sugaya Tatara Sannai, designated a National Important Tangible Folk Cultural Property in 1967. Its takadono smelting hall is the only one of its kind left standing in the country and served as the model for the ironworks in the animated film Princess Mononoke. Nearby, the Iron History Museum lays out the tools and lore of the trade across two halls, while the old Honmachi street still shows the white-walled storehouses of the Tanabe family, who ran the local iron business for generations. A roadside station, Tatara-ba Ichibanchi, makes a convenient first stop.

The residence sits about twenty minutes by car from the Yoshida-Kakeya interchange on the Matsue Expressway. Because the house remains privately owned, it is wise to confirm access before you go; the exterior and its great thatched roof reward a look in any season, and the surrounding tatara sites are fully open to the public.