Fujioka Family Residence Main House

A Farmhouse Wearing a Townhouse Face

The Fujioka Family Residence Main House (藤岡家住宅主屋, Fujioka-ke Jūtaku Shuoku) is a farmhouse built in 1928 in Kideracho, Nara City, Nara Prefecture, and registered as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property on 25 February 2016. It faces north onto the street in Kideracho, on the southeastern fringe of the old Naramachi district.

The timber house has a low half-storey loft (Tsushi-nikai) under a tiled roof, with a building area of 99 square metres. A canopy runs across the front, with the large main doorway toward the east. East of the doorway is a lattice window; to the west, a projecting lattice and a projecting lattice bay, so several kinds of lattice share one facade. The base is boarded vertically, and the loft windows have vertical bars made of angle steel.

Inside, the eastern two bays are an earth-floored area (Doma) with a central main pillar, and a great smoke-deflecting beam spans the back of it. The raised floor follows a staggered four-room plan: on the lower, eastern side an entry room, a 3-mat room and a boarded room; on the upper, western side a Buddhist altar room and the formal parlour, with a veranda along the back.

Modernising the Farmhouses around Naramachi

The Fujioka Family Residence Main House in Kideracho was registered for its contribution to the historic landscape. The Agency for Cultural Affairs notes that its tiled roof, used from the beginning, shows the modernisation of farm buildings on the edges of old Naramachi.

Thatched farmhouses once dotted the fringes of Naramachi. This house replaced one of them in the early Showa years with a tiled building. The lattice-lined front borrows the look of a townhouse, yet the broad earthen floor with its main pillar, the smoke-deflecting beam and the four-room plan are pure farmhouse. Townhouse outside, farmhouse inside: the double character records how farming families on the city’s edge adapted.

The house has continued to change. It was renovated between 1955 and 1974 and again in 2013.

Telling the Lattices Apart

Look at the front from the street and count the kinds of lattice. The window east of the main doorway, the projecting lattice and the lattice bay to the west each project and are assembled differently. Using so many types on one frontage is a sign of how readily the design language of the townhouse was adopted.

Raise your eyes to the loft windows. Their vertical bars are not wood but angle steel, L-shaped in section, a very early Showa touch: an industrial material slipped quietly into a traditional form.

Visiting

The Fujioka Family Residence Main House in Kideracho is a private home and its interior is not open. Please keep to the road, do not enter the property, and avoid photographs that intrude on the residents.

Kideracho lies south of Kintetsu Nara Station, about 1.2 km in a straight line, or roughly 20 minutes on foot. The area is residential with narrow lanes and no visitor parking.