Takazoe Family Western-Style Residence

A Modern House on a Takarazuka Hillside

On a slope above Takarazuka, in the residential quarter once marketed as Hanayashiki, stands a compact two-story house that would have startled its neighbours when it was finished in 1928. The Takazoe Family Western-Style Residence (Takazoe-ke Jutaku Yokan) belongs to the wave of garden suburbs that grew up along the railway between Osaka and Kobe in the first decades of the twentieth century. This was the world of Hanshinkan Modernism, a period when well-to-do Osaka families built homes in the hills to escape the crowded city, and the architecture that resulted mixed imported European fashions with Japanese building know-how.

The house is modest in footprint, with a building area of about 71 square metres, yet the design packs a great deal into two floors. The ground floor was given over to a billiard room, a leisure space that signalled a certain cosmopolitan taste. Upstairs held a study and similar rooms. Wood-framed and roofed in ceramic tile, the residence reads as European from the street, and the interior confirms the impression.

Why It Is Protected

The residence was entered in Japan's register of Tangible Cultural Properties on 29 November 2016, in the 85th round of registrations, under registration number 28-0654. The criterion cited was that the building serves as a model of design, the category reserved for structures whose form and detailing set a standard worth preserving.

What earns the house that status is its handling of exterior massing and interior ornament. Rather than settle for a single roof shape, the builder combined a hipped roof with gabled sections, then pushed out an entrance porch and projecting bay windows. The result is a silhouette that changes as you walk around it, never presenting the same face twice. Inside, the rooms carry Art Deco and Secession motifs, the geometric, streamlined vocabulary that arrived in Japan from Paris and Vienna in the 1920s. The consistency of that decorative program, applied throughout rather than in a single showpiece room, is part of why specialists regard the house as a fully realised example of its type.

The Western house does not stand alone. It anchors a small group of registered structures on the same property, together with a Japanese-style wing added in 1954, a small plastered storehouse, and a gate at the road, all listed on the same day. Read together, the four record how one family shaped its ground over three decades.

What to Look For

Because the residence remains a private home, its interior is not open to visitors, and the pleasures here are those of the street and the eye. Start with the roofline. The way the hipped and gabled forms meet, and the porch and bay windows break the wall plane, rewards a slow look from more than one angle.

Notice too how the house sits on its slope. The Hanayashiki and neighbouring Hibarigaoka districts were laid out as scenic suburbs, chosen for clean air, good water and views back toward Osaka, and the Takazoe house was placed to take advantage of that setting. The gentle streets, the mature trees and the older walls of the neighbourhood give context that a single building cannot supply on its own. A short walk through the surrounding lanes, several of which date to the original development, shows why families of means chose this hillside a century ago.