Ikekawa Family Residence Main House

About the Ikekawa Family Residence Main House

The Ikekawa Family Residence Main House (池川家住宅主屋, Ikekawa-ke Jūtaku Shuoku) is the principal dwelling of the Ikekawa Family Residence in Nakamachi, Nara City, Nara Prefecture, a Japanese-style wooden house of 2 stories with a single-story section built in 1967, and it was registered as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property in 2018.

It stands toward the south of the plot, its front turned south to a prefectural road. The roof is tiled and the building area is 161 square meters. The house was renovated in 1996 and again in 2012. Of the four registered Ikekawa buildings, this is the only one built after the war.

Why the Ikekawa Main House was registered

The Ikekawa Family Residence Main House was registered as contributing to the historic landscape. The Agency for Cultural Affairs singles out its lively exterior, in which several hip-and-gable roofs crowd in on one another, and says the house has a striking presence in its surroundings.

Nara City goes further and names four features that mark the house as a product of its time: the many gable faces of its hip-and-gable roofs, a floor plan organized around a central corridor, interiors based on the sukiya style, and the use of new building materials. On that basis the city calls the Ikekawa house a good example of a Japanese-style home from the opening years of the later Showa period.

It was registered on November 2, 2018, 51 years after it was built. What earned the registration is the way a traditional Japanese vocabulary was combined with the plan and materials of a late-1960s home.

What to look for at the Ikekawa Main House

Start with the roof. Rather than gathering everything under a single Irimoya-zukuri hip-and-gable roof, the Ikekawa Family Residence Main House combines several of different sizes. As a result the number and direction of the triangular gables (Hafu) change as you move, and from the front they seem to stack up one behind another.

Inside, a reception room and a formal tatami room (zashiki) sit beside the entrance hall, and the family's living rooms line up on the north side, across a central corridor (Naka-roka). Rooms for guests are at the front, rooms for the household at the back, with the corridor dividing them. That corridor plan is exactly what Nara City pointed to as typical of the period.

The entrance and the zashiki use sukiya details such as an Ajiro-tenjō ceiling of woven thin wood strips. At the same time, the city counted the use of new materials in the house's favor. The published notes do not say where those materials were used, but woven-wood ceilings and the new building products of the 1960s evidently share the same roof here.

Visiting the Ikekawa Family Residence Main House

The Ikekawa Family Residence Main House is still lived in, and we found no notice of the interior being opened as of October 2026. The woven ceilings of the entrance and zashiki cannot be seen from outside.

Because the house faces south onto the prefectural road, its crowded roofline is something to take in from the road. Please do not enter the grounds, and keep photographs to the exterior from the street. The estate layout and directions are on the Ikekawa Family Residence page.