Hara Family Residence Annex

A Retirement House Off the Main House

Hara Family Residence Annex (原家住宅離れ, Hara-ke Jūtaku Hanare) is a single-storey timber retirement house built around 1914 in Nihongi, Konan Ward, Niigata City, and registered as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property on 1 August 2016. It has a tiled hipped roof and a building area of 85 square metres, and it is the only one of the family's ten registered buildings to date from the Taishō era.

It stands north-east of the main house and is linked to it by a covered corridor. The same corridor reaches the storehouse and the back storehouse, so the annex also works as a junction for the northern side of the compound.

An inkyo-jo, or retirement house, was where the older head of a family and his wife lived after handing the household to the next generation: under a separate roof, but only a corridor away.

Layout and Registration

The building measures six ken along its length and three ken across, and inside it are four rooms arranged in a ta-no-ji plan, two by two, like the four squares of the character 田. That plan is common in Japanese farmhouses and town houses.

The Agency for Cultural Affairs draws attention to the south side. Here there is a veranda with a handrail at its end, and beyond that a line of full-height glass doors that open down to floor level. Slide them back, and the view runs straight from the rooms into the garden.

The Agency calls the design open, and the contrast with the main house is striking. The main house layers its eaves with an enclosed earthen passage and iron posts; the Hara Family Residence Annex opens itself to the south.

What to Look For

The south face is the point of the building: glass doors, veranda and handrail arranged as a frame for looking out.

Compare it with the main house, built in 1902. The annex came a little more than a decade later, and the freer use of glass may reflect that gap in time as much as the difference in purpose.

The four rooms are hidden from view, but the broad, low hipped roof of the Hara Family Residence Annex hints at the depth of the plan beneath it.

Viewing the Annex

The annex is closed to the public, and there are no opportunities to see its veranda or rooms.

It stands north-east of the main house, toward the back of the grounds. We have not been able to confirm how much of it is visible from the public road, and the grounds cannot be entered.