Horie Family Residence Main Building

A Kyoto House Built on a Return from Russia

Horie Residence Main House (堀江家住宅主屋, Horie-ke Jūtaku Shuoku, also written Horieke Jutaku Shuoku) is a single-storey wooden dwelling at 15 Hanazono Kitsuji-Minamimachi in Ukyo Ward, Kyoto, completed in 1921 and entered on Japan's national register of Tangible Cultural Properties on 23 July 2004.

The house sits in a quiet residential grid just southeast of Myoshinji, the vast Rinzai Zen monastery complex that occupies much of northern Hanazono. Walk the lanes there and the scale shifts constantly: temple walls, then two-storey postwar houses, then the occasional deep-eaved roof from an earlier decade. The Horie house belongs to that last category.

It was built for Horie Naozō, who left Japan for Russia in 1892. He came home for a spell, then crossed again, and made his living running a food-processing factory in the Japanese quarter. The Kyoto house was his retirement address. Nothing in its outward appearance announces three decades spent abroad. No brick, no sash windows, no Western wing bolted onto the side, which was the fashionable move for returning businessmen of his generation. He chose instead to build in a thoroughly Japanese idiom, and the interest of the building lies in what he quietly changed inside that idiom.

Why the Register Took Notice

The Agency for Cultural Affairs listed the house under registration criterion one, "a model of design," in the 43rd round of registrations. The formal notification followed on 17 August 2004, and the property carries registration number 26-0175. The recorded specification is brief: wooden, single storey, tile roof, floor area 121 square metres.

Registration, rather than designation as an Important Cultural Property, is the lighter of Japan's two protective regimes for buildings. It was created in 1996 for structures roughly fifty years old or more that shape the character of a place. Owners keep a free hand with interiors and everyday use; they need only notify the authorities before altering the exterior substantially. Most of the roughly 14,000 registered structures in Japan are, like this one, still lived in or still working.

What earned the Horie house its place is the plan. The Agency's own description points to a corridor that runs through the middle of the house and turns at a right angle, linking four distinct zones: a pair of connected formal rooms with a decorative alcove; the entrance and its adjoining waiting room; the tea room used by the family; and the kitchen. Every room is Japanese in floor covering, joinery and proportion. Yet each part can be reached without passing through another, which is not how a traditional town house or farmhouse worked, where rooms opened onto rooms and privacy was a matter of etiquette rather than architecture.

That shift is the point. Architectural historians read the middle-corridor plan as one of the first structural signs of the modern suburban house in Japan, and this building catches the idea early, in 1921, in an otherwise conservative shell.

Details Worth Knowing About

The roof is a hipped form covered with pantiles, the type of tile called sangawara: lighter and cheaper than the heavy round-and-flat combination used on temples, and by the Taisho era the standard choice for good residential work.

The timber is where the money went. The Agency's record singles out the use of Taiwan hinoki, a cypress from the mountains of central Taiwan, then under Japanese administration and newly accessible to mainland builders. It was prized for long, straight, tight-grained lengths that could be run as unjointed posts and lintels. A carpenter of the period would have understood the specification as a statement of quality without ornament.

The entrance repeats the shikidai, the raised board floor at the threshold of a samurai household where a guest was formally received. By 1921 this was a deliberately antique gesture. Directly beyond it lies a Japanese-style room that functions as a drawing room, doing the work a Western parlour would have done in a more fashionable house of the same date.

The formal rooms carry the standard set of alcove fittings, the zashikikazari, meaning a tokonoma alcove and its associated shelving and window bay. These are the elements a Japanese guest would read first on entering, in the way a European visitor might read a fireplace and its overmantel.

Seeing the Area: The House Is a Private Home

Horie Residence Main House is a private residence and is not open to the public. There are no visiting hours, no interior tours and no admission arrangements, and the Kyoto association of registered-property owners states the position plainly on its own listing. Photographing the exterior from the public street is possible, but the building sits behind a wall on a narrow residential lane where people live ordinary lives, so discretion matters more than the picture.

The trip is still worth making for what surrounds it. Myoshinji lies a few minutes' walk northwest, and three of its sub-temples keep regular public hours: Taizoin, with its dry landscape garden and the celebrated ink painting of a man trying to catch a catfish with a gourd; Keishunin; and Daishinin. Hokongoin, roughly ten minutes on foot to the south, is known for a Heian-period seated Amida and for lotus flowers in July.

The nearest station is Hanazono on the JR Sagano Line, about four minutes from Kyoto Station's western suburban platforms and a walk of some five minutes from the neighbourhood. Myoshinji Station on the Randen Kitano Line is a comparable distance. Both put the area within easy reach of Arashiyama, four stops further west.