Kitamura Museum of Art Shikunshien Front Gate

A Gatehouse Built with a Tea-Room Touch

Kitamura Museum of Art Shikunshien Front Gate (北村美術館四君子苑表門, Kitamura Bijutsukan Shikunshi-en Omotemon) is the main gate of Shikunshien, the former home of the businessman and tea collector Kitamura Kinjiro in Kajii-cho, Kamigyo Ward, Kyoto City; it was completed in 1944 and registered as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property in 2001.

It is a single-storey timber structure under a tiled roof, with a building area of 14 square metres. The builder was Kitamura Sutejiro, a Kyoto master carpenter of the sukiya school, who worked on the estate from 1940.

In form it is a Nagayamon, the long gatehouse type that samurai households and village headmen used to announce their standing: thick posts, a heavy roof, rooms running off either side of the passage. Here the type is kept and the swagger dropped. Posts and beams are slim logs left round, and the gabled roof, laid with pan tiles, rises at a gentle pitch. It reads less like a guardhouse than an outlying piece of a tea house.

Why It Was Registered

Kitamura Museum of Art Shikunshien Front Gate was registered as number 26-0096 under the criterion for buildings that serve as a model of design. The entrance and yoritsuki, the corridor and outer waiting bench, and the detached tea room were registered on the same day.

The Agency for Cultural Affairs description singles out the pairing of a formal gate type with sukiya refinement. A gate is the face a house turns to the street, and usually it speaks of rank. This one speaks the language of the tea room instead, and the agency notes fresh design ideas throughout.

What to Look For

Look up. Beneath Kitamura Museum of Art Shikunshien Front Gate the roof is left open as a exposed ceiling: round-log rafters set well apart, with round bamboo nailed tightly across them. Sparse logs against dense bamboo make a deliberate change of rhythm on a single plane.

Then look at the strip of wall above the opening. A Ranma fills it, its lattice recalling the mushiko-mado, the slatted windows on the 2nd floor of old Kyoto townhouses. It is a small quotation from the city's streets set above a private gate.

Size matters here too. At 14 square metres the gate is modest, and the slim members and low roof keep it from looming over the lane.

Visiting

Kitamura Museum of Art Shikunshien Front Gate, like the rest of the garden, is closed except during short special openings in spring and autumn. Photography is not allowed anywhere inside the garden, so the bamboo ceiling and the lattice are things to study on the spot. Most of the detail is overhead; give yourself a minute standing under the gate.