Former Terae Family Residence, Store and Main House

A Kyoto Shop House with a Western Face

The Former Terae Family Residence, Store and Main House (旧寺江家住宅店舗及び主屋, Kyū Terae-ke Jūtaku Tenpo oyobi Omoya) is a two-storey timber building completed in 1935 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. It faces west onto Shinmachi-dōri and covers a building area of 153 square metres beneath a tiled roof.

Kyoto's merchant families built to a plan known as omoya-zukuri (表屋造). A front block held the business, the family lived in a separate block behind it, and the two were tied together by a roofed passage. The Terae house follows that arrangement exactly. What it abandons is the front block's traditional face.

In place of lattice screens and a low mushiko-mado grille, the street elevation is a Western-style block: flat, undecorated, organised around horizontal bands and generous glazing. The interior of that block has no partitions at all, upstairs or down, just one open room on each floor. Behind it the roof reverts to Japanese tile. Cross to the far pavement and the building resolves into two architectural periods stacked front to back on a single deep plot.

Why the Building Was Registered

Registration came on 24 June 2021 under registration number 26-0632, in the ninety-ninth round of national listings, under the criterion covering buildings that contribute to the historic landscape of the country. The Agency for Cultural Affairs states the case for it in one sentence: the house shows the direction that housing in Kyoto was taking in the early Shōwa years.

Read the rear block and that claim becomes concrete. A doma, the earth-floored working strip that runs the depth of every machiya, still occupies the southern side of the ground floor. The northern side does something else. Rooms there are arranged along a nakarōka, a central corridor with living spaces opening off it to north and south.

That corridor is the quiet radical in the plan. Traditional machiya rooms were strung one behind another, so reaching the back of the house meant walking through everything in front of it, and privacy came down to how firmly a sliding screen was shut. The central corridor entered Japanese domestic architecture through the housing reform debates of the Taishō and early Shōwa decades, borrowed from Western planning, and it gave individual rooms doors of their own. Finding one in a 1935 Kyoto townhouse, sharing a plot with an intact earth floor, is precisely what the registration recognises.

Research compiled by the Kyoto Modern Architecture Festival attributes both design and construction to Hashimoto Kasaburō of Hashimoto Kōmuten, a building contractor rather than an academically trained architect. The Agency for Cultural Affairs database leaves that field blank, so the name is best treated as coming from the festival's own research rather than from the national register.

Seeing It for Yourself

This is a private house and it is not open on any regular schedule. The exterior, though, stands on a public street and can be studied at any hour, free of charge, from the pavement opposite. Photography from the street is unrestricted in the ordinary way.

Interiors have opened during the Kyoto Modern Architecture Festival (京都モダン建築祭), a city-wide event held over selected days each autumn since 2022. The Terae house joined the 2022, 2024 and 2025 editions, with the main house and the tōriniwa passage on the published route, and entry by festival passport rather than a ticket bought at the door. In 2022 a tea ceremony class held practice sessions in the tatami rooms during the opening, with matcha served free to the first twenty visitors each day. The line-up changes every year, so the festival programme is the thing to check before building a trip around it.

Rokkaku-chō has a second claim on the calendar. This block owns Kita-Kannon-yama, one of the great floats of the Gion Matsuri, and the float is assembled directly outside on Shinmachi-dōri from the early morning of 19 July. A trial pull follows on 20 July, and on 24 July the float leads the Ato Matsuri procession through the city. For those days the street is closed to traffic and the view from the Terae facade is of a wheeled wooden stage carrying a living pine.

Reaching the site is easy. Karasuma Station on the Hankyū Kyoto Line and Shijō Station on the subway Karasuma Line each sit roughly eight minutes away on foot, and the Shijō-Nishinotōin and Shijō-Karasuma bus stops are closer still. The household's annex, registered on the same day under the adjacent number, stands out of sight at the back of the same plot.