Sanrakuso Apartement

Sanraku-so Annex: The Wing Built for Guests and Gardens

Behind the great street-facing main house of Sanraku-so lies a quieter building whose whole design turns toward pleasure rather than trade. The annex, or hanare, was raised in 1909 on the north side of the main dwelling, with gardens set to its front and rear. Where the main building announces the family's standing to the road, this wing was made for receiving guests, and every choice in it follows from that purpose.

It is a two-storey timber structure of about 124 square meters, roughly 13 meters along the ridge and just under 10 meters deep, roofed in hip-and-gable pantile. A lower skirt roof, the geya, wraps the ground floor and softens the transition to the garden.

A Building That Reads the Garden

Sanraku-so was registered as a tangible cultural property on 26 January 2011, and the annex was recognized for its contribution to the historic character of the region. That contribution is easiest to grasp from the garden side. The west face, looking onto the pond-viewing Japanese garden shared with the main house, is left open and light, its rooms designed to borrow the water and planting outside. The east face plays a different note, with a second-storey lattice window cut in a mokko outline, the rounded quatrefoil shape drawn from a gourd cross-section.

The annex is attributed to a carpenter of the Yokoyama line, the same family whose master built the main house a generation earlier. Continuity of hand shows in the assurance of the joinery.

The Carving Worth the Trip

Inside, the large reception room carries the finest woodwork on the property. Its ranma, the pierced transom panels above the sliding screens, were cut from single boards of prized timber. One depicts peonies with a Chinese lion, worked from a single plank of Yakusugi cedar; another shows sparrows among bamboo. The built-in study alcove uses a fukiyose hanabishi lattice, its slender bars gathered in irregular clusters, and an upstairs transom carries a design of chrysanthemums in flowing water.

Then there are the windows. Flower-shaped openings in the wall are backed on the inside by paper screens, so light entering from outside falls as a blossom silhouette on the shoji. Patterns worked into the paper deepen the effect. These are the flourishes of craftsmen with time and good material, and they repay slow looking.

Seeing It in Context

The annex is best understood alongside the main building and the small tea room joined to its north-west corner, since the three form a sequence from public frontage to private retreat. Interiors are open without charge. Stand in the west rooms with the garden in view and the logic of the whole wing falls into place: this is architecture arranged around a single act of hospitality.