Former Yamamoto Residence (Yamamoto Kiyoshi Memorial Foundation Hall) Main House

Former Yamamoto Residence (Yamamoto Kiyoshi Memorial Foundation Hall) Main House

Okada Takao spent his working days in the housing design department of the Mitsukoshi department store in Osaka, and his private hours studying tea houses. Both halves of that description are legible in the house he designed at Yuzen-cho in Nishinomiya, and legible in the same room more often than you might expect.

The main house is a timber-framed building of two storeys with a single-storey section attached, roofed in pantile, with a building area of 331 square metres. It sits at the centre of a plot on the west side of the street and faces east, its principal volume covered by a hipped roof. To the north, a lower wing holds the kitchen and the service rooms. The exterior walls are finished in kakiotoshi, a scraped mortar rendering that leaves a slightly granular, matte surface, and on the front elevation the timber posts are left exposed against it, with a band of stone facing at the base. The effect is closer to English half-timbering than to anything in the Japanese carpentry tradition, though the carpentry tradition is waiting on the other side of the wall.

The house went up in 1937 according to the Agency for Cultural Affairs register, though the foundation's own chronology and most local accounts give 1938. Its first owner was Kondo Juichiro (1880 to 1958), who had made a fortune in iron mining in Tottori Prefecture; the contractor was the Kasatani firm of Ashiya. The plot runs to about 1,266 square metres, roughly 400 tsubo in the older measure, with 628 square metres of floor area across the buildings.

Registered, Not Designated: What That Distinction Means

The main house carries registration number 28-0293 on the national register of Tangible Cultural Properties. It was entered on the register on 5 December 2007 and formally notified on 19 December, in the fifty-seventh round of registrations, under the criterion that it contributes to the historical landscape of the country.

Registration is not the same thing as designation, and the difference matters for anyone reading Japanese heritage signage. National Treasures and Important Cultural Properties are designated: the state selects them for outstanding value and imposes tight controls on any alteration. The registration system, introduced by a 1996 amendment to the Law for the Protection of Cultural Properties, was built for a different problem. Japan's stock of modern buildings, houses and factories and bridges from the Meiji period onward, was disappearing faster than it could be assessed. Registration lets an owner apply to have a building recorded, receive limited support, and retain considerable freedom to keep using it. The owner notifies the authorities before altering the exterior; that is close to the whole of the burden.

Five buildings on this site are registered under the same name: the main house, the front gate and wall, the gatehouse, the storehouse and the tea house. Read together they preserve an entire suburban household of the late 1930s, not a single showpiece extracted from its setting. That completeness is much of the point.

Two later honours followed. Hyogo Prefecture placed the house among its hundred selected modern residences in 2010, and Nishinomiya designated it a building of townscape importance in 2011.

Inside: Spanish Tile, Izumo Timber

The suburb explains a good deal. When the Hankyu railway pushed west from Osaka in the early twentieth century, the hills between Osaka and Kobe filled with the houses of merchants and industrialists who wanted a garden, a view and a train to the office. Architects working here developed a domestic idiom that took Western planning and Mediterranean surfaces and grafted them onto Japanese room types. Historians call it Hanshinkan Modernism. This house is one of its more thoroughgoing experiments.

Enter through a half-timbered porch onto Spanish-style tile. The reception room holds stained glass and the family's collection of tea utensils, lacquer and paintings, assembled by Yamamoto Kiyoshi and his wife Tomie. A guest room and a study follow. Then the plan turns: the principal zashiki opens onto the garden across a wooden veranda, and from that point the vocabulary is tatami, sliding screens and the view of a tea house across the stones.

Climb the staircase, whose balustrade repays a slow look, and the second floor repeats the trick in reverse. A Western bedroom with a chandelier gives way to Japanese rooms, one of which incorporates a space for a household Shinto altar, an arrangement said to be unusual in a private house of this period.

The room most visitors remember is the chanoma, the informal sitting room at the back. Okada the tea-house scholar took over here: an ajiro ceiling of woven strips, coffered work in places, and a sunken hearth with a well beneath it, still a novelty in the 1930s. A small garden outside its window contains a plum said to have a connection to Matsudaira Fumai, the eighteenth-century daimyo and tea master of Matsue whose school of tea shaped the tea house in the main garden.

The house came through the Great Hanshin Earthquake of January 1995 with damage but no failure of the frame. Yamamoto Kiyoshi had died the previous year, having bought the house in 1966 as its fifth owner; his will directed that the property and the art collection pass to a foundation, which was established in the late 1990s. It has run the house as a cultural centre ever since, with classes, room hire and public visits.

Those visits require booking by the previous day at the latest. Opening hours are 10:30 to 15:30, with last admission at 15:00, and the house closes on Sundays, Mondays and public holidays. Admission is 300 yen for adults and 150 yen for schoolchildren. From Hankyu Shukugawa station the walk takes about nine minutes; from Kurakuen-guchi about eight; from JR Sakura-Shukugawa about twelve. Spring is worth timing, since the Shukugawa river a few streets away is one of the country's better-known cherry avenues.