Former Tomita Family Residence Western-Style Building

What Is the Former Tomita Family Residence Western-Style Building?

The Former Tomita Family Residence Western-Style Building (旧冨田家住宅洋館, Kyū Tomita-ke Jūtaku Yōkan) is a small single-storey wooden house in Western style, built in the early Showa period (1926 to 1945) in the southeast of the Tomita timber merchants' plot in Ōaza Sakurai, Sakurai City, Nara Prefecture, and it was registered as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property on June 24, 2021. It has a gabled Kirizuma-zukuri roof covered in slate and a building area of 34 square meters.

Its registration number, 29-0318, is the first of the six buildings registered from the house, and it qualified for contributing to the historic landscape of the country. The Agency for Cultural Affairs sums it up as a modest building with a memorable face. In a compound of tatami rooms, a tea room and earthen storehouses, the Western-Style Building is the only structure that borrows a European way of building in wood.

Half-Timbering and Pebble-Dash Walls

The walls of the Former Tomita Family Residence Western-Style Building are in Half-timbering: posts and beams show on the surface, and the panels between them are filled with what Japanese builders call doitsu-kabe, or German wall, a rough coat of mortar mixed with gravel that was troweled or sprayed on. It was a common finish on houses of the early Showa years. Instead of smooth white plaster, the building plays its coarse wall texture against the lines of the timber.

The gable end is where to look first. Short vertical struts are set close together across the triangle, so the timber lines build up into a dense pattern.

The entrance porch at the front is topped with a shallow segmental arch. Everything else on the exterior is straight timber, and this one curve marks the way in.

A Single Room under a Plaster Ceiling

Inside, the Former Tomita Family Residence Western-Style Building is one Western-style room. The lower walls are lined with wooden Koshiita wainscoting, and the ceiling is finished in Shikkui lime plaster with a ceiling medallion at its center. Such medallions, usually round and often placed where a lamp hangs, were a standard way of giving a Western-style room some formality.

Unlike the other five buildings of the house, the Western-Style Building has no 2018 renovation noted in the date field of the Agency's database. The inn's own pages say nothing about how this building is used, and its present use could not be confirmed.

Visiting the Former Tomita Family Residence Western-Style Building

The Former Tomita Family Residence Western-Style Building stands in the southeast of a property that now operates as the inn Kura no Yado Ōrintei. The units the inn offers correspond to the Annex and the Inner Room, and no information was found about opening the Western-Style Building's interior.

Its position in the southeast suggests that the Western-Style Building sits on the side of the plot nearer the street, but how much of it can be seen from the public road has not been checked. This is a working inn, so please look from outside without entering, and be mindful of the guests when taking photographs.