Former Hayashi Family Residence

What Is the Former Hayashi Family Residence?

The Former Hayashi Family Residence is a 2-storey Western-style timber house designed by Nishimura Isaku and built around 1923 in Sukeyasu, Kurashiki City, Okayama Prefecture, and registered as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property of Japan on October 27, 2017.

In Japanese it is 旧林家住宅 (Kyū Hayashi-ke Jūtaku). The place name 祐安 is read Sukeyasu. Several other houses in Japan share the same registered name, so it helps to remember this one as the Hayashi house in Kurashiki.

The Agency for Cultural Affairs places the house in a district that the Ōhara family of Kurashiki developed as a high-quality residential area. The present owners' website says it was built for the second son of Hayashi Genjūrō, the Kurashiki pharmacist and Christian community leader, who worked as a director of Kurashiki Spinning under Ōhara Magosaburō.

The same website traces a varied later history. During the Second World War the house took in evacuees; after the war it was requisitioned by the occupation forces and lived in by an Australian family of a commanding officer; it then served as company housing for Mitsubishi Heavy Industries. The agency records alterations and an extension in 1960. Today it is a private home, known to its owners as the Nishiguchi Residence (西口邸).

Why the Former Hayashi Family Residence Is Registered

The Former Hayashi Family Residence is entry 33-279 in the national register, added in the 88th round of registrations under the criterion of having become a model of design. The agency records a 2-storey timber building with a tiled roof and a building area of 154 square meters.

Its designer, Nishimura Isaku (1884 to 1963), was an artist, educator and the founder of the Bunka Gakuin school in Tokyo. He argued for houses built around family life rather than around receiving guests, and he held up an ideal he called the den'en shōjūka, a small house in the country. The agency describes the Former Hayashi Family Residence as an attempt to give that ideal a real form.

The plan shows how. The entrance is at the southeast corner, and behind it is a hall. From there a central corridor (Naka-roka) runs west. Western-style living and dining rooms face south toward the sun, while the kitchen, bath and other water rooms are gathered on the north side. Instead of the formal guest rooms that dominated larger Japanese houses of the time, the best rooms in the Former Hayashi Family Residence are the ones the family used every day.

What Makes the Former Hayashi Family Residence Distinctive

Stone, chimney and sun window

According to the owners, the dining room of the Former Hayashi Family Residence has an exterior of coursed fieldstone that gives it an English country look. A stone chimney rises from the fireplace, and a sun window opens in the roof above the upper floor. The owners describe the chimney as a long-standing local landmark.

A living room with a fireplace

Inside, the owners describe fireplaces in both the ground-floor living room and an upstairs bedroom. Glass doors divide the living room from the dining room, so the two can open into one bright space. The stair landing has windows high in the stairwell that let slanting light into the hall.

Japanese rooms and a garden

The house is not entirely Western. It also has 4 tatami rooms of different sizes, one fitted for the tea ceremony, which look onto a Japanese-style garden with a small five-storied stone pagoda. The owners' photographs also show the entrance looking much as it does in a family photograph taken in the late 1920s.

Visiting the Former Hayashi Family Residence

The Former Hayashi Family Residence is a private home and is not open to the public. Okayama Prefecture lists it as exterior viewing only, and the owners' website states that the house is currently closed to general visitors. If you pass by, look from the public road only, do not enter the grounds, and be careful about photographing a lived-in house.

The house stands on high ground in Sukeyasu, about 2 kilometers north of JR Kurashiki Station. Okayama Prefecture gives the travel time as about 10 minutes by car from the station. The owners' website accepts inquiries through a contact form.