Itoki Shoten Muryoshian Main House

What Is the Itoki Shoten Muryoshian Main House?

The Itoki Shoten Muryoshian Main House (伊藤喜商店無量子庵主屋, Itōki Shōten Muryōshi-an) is a 2-storey timber residence built around 1926 at the rear of the Itoki Shoten property on Matsubara-dori in Higashiyama Ward, Kyoto, and registered as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property on July 8, 2008. It stands near the center of the southern half of the plot, with the tea room, storehouse, and well of Muryoshian grouped around it.

The house measures 6.5 ken by 4.5 ken, with its ridge running east to west under a Kirizuma-zukuri gable roof in Sangawara-buki pantiles, partly finished in copper sheet. The national database gives a building area of 136 square meters. The Kyoto association of registered property owners gives 178 square meters instead; this article follows the national figure.

The name Muryoshian was given by a priest who later lived in the house.

Why It Was Registered

The Itoki Shoten Muryoshian Main House was registered as a model of design. The Agency for Cultural Affairs calls it a fine surviving example of a modern Japanese-style house.

Materials and design carry that judgment. According to Kyoto City, the house was built mainly of tsuga, Japanese hemlock, which at the time was valued above hinoki cypress. Tsuga has a fine, even grain and mellows to a warm amber with age. The rooms follow the formal Shoin-zukuri manner, while the upper floor borrows from the lighter Sukiya-zukuri style.

A merchant built this house behind his shop and gave it both the dignity of a shoin reception room and the ease of a sukiya retreat. It shows where the surplus of a successful Kyoto business went in the last years of the Taisho era.

What to Look For

Service to the east, reception to the west

The plan divides cleanly in two. The entrance, earthen-floored work area, and kitchen occupy the east side. A corridor and staircase separate them from the west side, where a ten-mat Zashiki reception room and its anteroom sit side by side, with Engawa verandas along the front and back. Household work stays east; guests are received west. Read the Muryoshian Main House as those two bands and the plan falls into place.

A sukiya room upstairs

The upper floor holds a ten-mat room in sukiya style, among others. The formal shoin rooms below and the relaxed room above suggest a household that used its two floors for different kinds of company.

Exterior finishes

Kyoto City describes the outside as follows. The front walls are finished in juraku earthen plaster, with a broad baseboard around the entrance. The roof is tiled, the lower edge of the eaves is sheathed in copper, and the gable walls are clad in wide cedar boards. Each part of the Muryoshian house changes material: clay on the walls, a band of copper at the eaves, timber at the gables.

How to Visit

The Itoki Shoten Muryoshian Main House is a rented private home and its interior is not open to the public (checked September 27, 2026). Set in the southern half of the plot behind the shop, it is almost entirely hidden from Matsubara-dori.

The way into Muryoshian is through a gate on the west side of the shop, but the path beyond it serves the residents. Please do not go in.

Photographs of the exterior are published in the national database and on Cultural Heritage Online.