Former Terae Family Residence Annex

The Small Building at the Back of the Plot

The Former Terae Family Residence Annex (旧寺江家住宅離れ, Kyū Terae-ke Jūtaku Hanare) is a two-storey wooden building of 1935 standing at the innermost end of a merchant plot in Rokkaku-chō, Nakagyō Ward, Kyoto City, and registered as a National Registered Tangible Cultural Property (登録有形文化財) on 24 June 2021. Its building area is 28 square metres, roughly a fifth of the main house in front of it.

It sits at the eastern edge of the site, behind the main house, its ridge running north to south. The roof is kirizuma-zukuri, a straightforward gable, covered in sangawara pantile, and a hisashi eave projects over the western face to keep sun and rain off the wall below. That wall is shinkabe construction, the finish in which structural posts remain visible within the plaster rather than being buried behind it, and glass doors fill the openings.

Small, plain, cheaply detailed by comparison with the street front. All of that is the point.

A Hanare That Never Rested

The word hanare normally promises something quite different. In a Japanese house it names a detached wing set a little apart from daily traffic: a retirement room for a grandparent, a guest suite, a tea room reached across a strip of garden. Here the word is administrative convenience and nothing more.

The ground floor holds an earth-floored entrance and a board-floored room that the national register calls a goods store. Upstairs, two rooms served as a rest area for employees. The Agency for Cultural Affairs states the reason without decoration: the Terae household earned its living in dyeing, and this building preserves the operating shape of a dyer's business premises.

Kyoto's textile economy ran on division of labour. A length of white silk bound for a finished kimono passed through the hands of specialists scattered across the city, each performing one operation before the cloth moved on, and the wholesale houses along Shinmachi-dōri and Muromachi-dōri stood at the centre of that traffic. A merchant plot in this district therefore needed three distinct kinds of space: a front room where customers were received, dry and orderly storage for stock in transit, and somewhere for staff to sit down between jobs.

The annex supplied the second and third. Registering it on the same day as the main house, under the adjacent number 26-0633 and the same criterion covering contribution to the historic landscape, treats the plot as one working organism rather than as a handsome facade with outbuildings attached. Kyoto has many surviving merchant fronts. Surviving back-of-house buildings, kept because they are useful and not because they are decorative, are considerably rarer.

What a Visitor Can Actually See

An honest answer first: not much, at least not directly. The annex stands deep inside a private plot with the main house in front of it, so nothing of it is visible from Shinmachi-dōri. When the Kyoto Modern Architecture Festival opened the property in 2022, the published route covered the main house and the tōriniwa passage, and the annex did not appear on it. The property has taken part again in later editions, in 2024 and 2025, but the same caution applies: the areas opened are set by the owner and announced each year in the festival programme.

The most dependable view of the building is the photograph published in the Agency for Cultural Affairs database, taken of the second-floor exterior from the west, which shows the gable, the eave and the glazed wall clearly. Anyone able to get inside the plot during an opening should look for the junction where the annex meets the open yard behind the main house, since the relationship between working yard and store room is what the building is about.

Above ground level, the neighbourhood repays a walk. Rokkaku-chō takes its name from Rokkaku-dōri, which in turn is named for the hexagonal hall of Chōhō-ji, a short distance east. A few blocks north on the same street, Hachikuan, the former Kawasaki Residence of 1926, admits paying visitors and offers an interior of the same district and roughly the same generation. In late July the street outside carries Kita-Kannon-yama, the Gion Matsuri float owned by this very block.

Karasuma Station on the Hankyū Kyoto Line and Shijō Station on the subway Karasuma Line are each about eight minutes on foot, with the Shijō-Nishinotōin and Shijō-Karasuma bus stops nearer still.