Wada Family Residence Ennenro

What the Wada Family Residence Ennenro Is

Wada Family Residence Ennenro (和田家住宅延年楼) is a single-storey tea house in the Jiyugaoka district of Mito, Ibaraki Prefecture, built in 1835 and entered on the national register of tangible cultural properties on November 17, 2015. Mito City records it as the oldest surviving tea house in the city.

It was not built as an independent structure. Otaka Origyoemon Moriyoshi, sixth head of a merchant house in Bakurocho, the district now called Suehirocho, had studied tea in the Sekishu school and put up the building inside his own grounds. What survives at Wada Family Residence Ennenro is therefore a wealthy townsman's private tea house from the last decades of the Edo period, not a temple or domain facility.

The name came from outside the family. Matsudaira Yorikata, seventh lord of the Shishido domain, gave the building the name Ennenro, and it has been known by it since.

The Plan, and Why It Was Registered

The registration was made under the criterion of serving as a model of design. Two things support that judgement: the date is firmly established, and the building carries the forms and the taste of late Edo tea architecture in a way that can still be read on site.

Wada Family Residence Ennenro is timber framed and single storey, roofed in tile with copper sheet in part, and covers 68 square meters of floor area. The main roof is Kirizuma-zukuri finished in Sangawara-buki, while the earthen-floored eaves along the front are sheeted in copper.

The rooms run in sequence from the east: the entrance, then a waiting room of 5 Tatami mats with a built-in closet, then a shoin room fitted with the formal alcove ornaments. North of the shoin is the Mizuya preparation area, and beyond it two tea rooms, one of 3 mats and one of a mat and a daime, the shortened three-quarter mat that lets the host sit close to the guests.

Two tea rooms in one building is unusual for a private house of this kind, and it is the reason the Mito City Board of Education describes Wada Family Residence Ennenro as a large example. The waiting room and the shoin give it the depth of a small reception suite rather than a single hut in a garden.

Moved Twice, and Still Itself

The building did not stay where it was raised. It was taken down and rebuilt in 1960, and again in 1978, which is how it came to stand in Jiyugaoka on the eastern side of Mito, well away from the merchant quarter it was made for.

Buildings rarely come through that twice without losing their substance. Wada Family Residence Ennenro did. The Agency for Cultural Affairs notes that the members have been largely retained through both moves, and the record of the moves themselves is known rather than guessed at. Even the garden stones reuse the older material.

That combination, a documented date of 1835 and an unbroken record of what happened afterwards, is what makes the building useful to anyone studying tea architecture. Many surviving tea rooms are dated by style alone.

Visiting: What Is and Is Not Possible

Wada Family Residence Ennenro is privately owned and is not open to the public. Mito City lists the custodian simply as a private individual, and neither the city nor the Agency for Cultural Affairs publishes opening hours, an admission charge or any regular viewing arrangement. There is no reception, no ticket, and no interior access.

The building stands within a private property in a residential part of Jiyugaoka in Mito, and for that reason this article gives the location only as far as the district. Please do not attempt to approach the house or photograph it over a fence. Registration under this system places obligations on the owner about alterations and demolition, not an obligation to admit visitors.

You can still see the building. The national database of designated cultural properties carries a photograph supplied by the Mito City Board of Education, and the Mito City page reproduces it as well. Questions about the property go to the Cultural Properties Section of the Mito City Board of Education, on 029-306-8132.

If you are in Mito for tea architecture, the practical route is to ask that office what is publicly accessible at the time of your visit. Occasional openings of registered private buildings are arranged locally rather than announced far in advance.