Former Takeda Family Residence Main Building

A Dye Merchant's Townhouse on Takatsuji

The Former Takeda Family Residence Main House (旧武田家住宅主屋, Kyū-Takeda-ke Jūtaku Shuoku) is a two-storey wooden machiya at Eiyōji-chō 242-1, Takatsuji-dōri Aburanokōji Higashi-iru, Shimogyō Ward, Kyoto City, built in the early Meiji period and registered as a national Tangible Cultural Property on 25 April 2014.

It faces north onto Takatsuji-dōri and follows the omoya-zukuri arrangement used by the larger Kyoto townhouses: a front block standing on the street line, a separate residential block set behind it, and courtyards linking the two. The plan usually indicates a merchant who wanted business and family life kept apart. The Takeda family dealt in dyestuffs, in a city whose textile trade made that a substantial business.

The street elevation divides horizontally. On the ground floor, projecting degōshi lattice frames alternate with flat hiragōshi. Above, the second storey is treated as a plastered ōkabe wall, closed and smooth, pierced by long horizontal windows. Building area is 131 square metres; the Agency for Cultural Affairs dates the fabric to between 1868 and 1882, with a remodelling in 1916.

Two Winding Staircases, and Who Cut Them

What lifts this house above the many surviving Kyoto machiya is the joinery inside, and the clearest evidence sits at the foot of the residential block.

A mawari-kaidan, a staircase that turns as it climbs, opens directly ahead of anyone stepping in from the entrance court. A second one, of different design, stands elsewhere in the house. Two winding staircases in a single townhouse is close to extravagance; ordinary machiya make do with one steep straight flight tucked beside a cupboard.

The work is attributed to Tango carpenters brought in from Maizuru, on the Sea of Japan coast some 80 kilometres north. Through the Meiji and Taishō years these craftsmen adapted the timber techniques of shrine-and-temple building and of boatbuilding to hybrid Japanese-Western commissions, the Catholic Church in Miyazu among the best known. Their curves came out of hulls as much as out of hondō roofs, and that lineage is visible on the stairs here.

The bathroom at the rear of the ground floor is the other set piece. Its ceiling is recessed into an octagon. Tiles cover the walls, and the window grilles are cut so that the pattern reads differently from inside the room than from the garden outside. Upstairs, a ranma transom carries a chrysanthemum motif. The Agency for Cultural Affairs summary singles out the sukiya touches in the alcove fittings of the early-Taishō living quarters, where the principal rooms on both floors measure eight tatami mats.

Visiting: What Is and Is Not Possible

This is a private house with no visitor programme. There is no ticket desk, no opening hours, and no interior access for the general public. Registered Tangible Cultural Property status carries no obligation to open the doors, and most of the roughly 14,000 buildings on the register never do.

The exterior is another matter, and it is the part the registration criterion actually rewards. The building was listed under the first of the three criteria used for this category, contribution to the historic character of the national landscape, which is a statement about the street rather than the rooms. Standing on Takatsuji-dōri and reading the lattice work across the ground floor is a legitimate way to see this property.

The house has appeared on the rental market through the Kyoto machiya specialist Hachise, offered for residential or commercial tenancy. Occupancy changes, so anyone hoping the building might reopen as a shop or café should check current listings rather than assume.

Photography from the public street is unrestricted. Photographing into the entrance or over the wall is not appropriate here.

Getting There, and Three Similar Names to Keep Apart

Shijō Station on the Karasuma subway line is about nine minutes away on foot; Karasuma Station on the Hankyū Kyoto line, about twelve. The nearest bus stop is Nishinotōin-Bukkōji, three minutes off. The location puts you a short walk from Bukkōji temple and within twenty minutes of Nishiki Market, so the house fits naturally into a walk through the older commercial quarters south of Shijō.

Two clarifications are worth making. The Takeda Family Residence in Takaoka City, Toyama Prefecture, is a wholly separate property: an eighteenth-century farmhouse designated an Important Cultural Property in 1971, unconnected to the Kyoto family. And within Kyoto itself, the word shuoku in the registered name refers to the residential block behind, not to the whole compound, though the registration covers the building as a single unit.