Hara Family Residence Main House

The House at the Centre of the Compound

Hara Family Residence Main House (原家住宅主屋, Hara-ke Jūtaku Shuoku) is a single-storey timber house with a tiled roof, built in 1902 in Nihongi, Konan Ward, Niigata City, and registered as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property on 1 August 2016. With a building area of 278 square metres, it is the largest of the ten registered buildings on the family's grounds.

It stands a little south of the middle of the plot, facing south. The formal entrance, reserved for honoured guests, has a Shikidai, the broad raised step where visitors were received. To its left runs a line of Zashiki, the rooms used for receiving and entertaining.

The Buddhist altar room wing is attached at the north-west corner, and a covered corridor leads from the north-east side to the annex. Almost every route through the compound begins here.

What the Registration Recognised

The Agency for Cultural Affairs keeps its description brief. The reception rooms are fairly plain, it says, with no showpiece carving, but the timber is good, the way you would expect in a lumber merchant's house. That remark is one of the few written clues to what the family did for a living.

Its second point concerns the veranda. The Hara Family Residence Main House runs a band of glazed sliding doors along the outside of its Engawa, turning the strip inside them into a doen, an earth-floored passage brought in under the roof. Beyond the glass, iron posts hold up the eaves.

The Agency singles out this layered arrangement as a good example of a feature typical of the district. It is a telling pairing: a house assembled from carefully chosen wood hands the job of carrying its eaves to iron.

What to Look For

On the south front the layers read one behind another: the row of iron posts, the line of glass doors, the earthen passage and veranda inside them, and the reception rooms at the back.

The entrance deserves a second look. The official note describes it as the entrance for important guests, which suggests the household used another door day to day.

Then there is the gate. It stands off to one side of the entrance rather than squarely in front, so a guest arriving at the Hara Family Residence Main House crossed the forecourt at an angle.

Viewing the Main House

The house is still lived in. Its interior is closed, and we found no occasions on which the reception rooms or the doen are shown to visitors.

The south front faces the gate and the road. Look only from the public road outside the gate and do not enter the grounds. There is no published photography policy, so keep residents and the inside of rooms out of frame.