Arai Family Residence Main House

What the Arai Family Residence Main House is

The Arai Family Residence Main House (新井家住宅主屋, Arai-ke Jūtaku Shuoku) is the single-storey timber living wing, built in 1932, of the Arai Family Residence in Nakasho, Izumisano City, Osaka Prefecture, and was registered as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property on July 8, 1999. It carries register number 27-0068. With a building area of 329 square meters it is the largest of the six registered structures on the estate.

Of the three wings around the garden, the main house forms the right arm. The inner room wing on the left and the entrance and zashiki wing in the center were the formal side where guests were received. The main house was where the family actually lived and where the kitchen worked, and the owners describe it simply as the part used as a home.

Plan of the Main House and why it was registered

The Agency for Cultural Affairs calls the plan of the Arai Family Residence Main House distinctive. Its own entrance opens onto the forecourt. To the south, three 6-mat rooms and a 4.5-mat room run one after another in a long line. Across an inner courtyard to the north sit an 8-mat room, the bath and the toilet, and in the northeast corner is a kitchen of about 21 mats.

That kitchen is the key. The Agency notes that it served not only family meals but also the entertaining of guests. In a house built to double as a guest house, the question of where and on what scale food for the reception rooms would be prepared shaped the plan itself, and a 21-mat kitchen shows how much hosting was expected.

Setting the living rooms in a single file and using a courtyard to separate them from the bath and kitchen also follows a different logic from the guest wings. The main house shares the registration criterion of all six entries, contribution to the historic landscape, and it records the working household that kept the formal rooms running.

What to look for in the Main House

Visitors today will find a kitchen studio inside the Arai Family Residence Main House. It was added in 2023, when repairs and strengthening after Typhoon Jebi in 2018 were completed, and covers about 54 square meters. The official site names the architect and the builder who carried out the conversion.

A wing that once fed the family's guests now holds a kitchen again, this time for cooking classes and shoots. It is a useful example of an old house taking on a new use without changing what it was for.

From outside, look for the entrance on the forecourt. The family had its own door here, quite separate from the formal entrance in the central wing, and that double entry sums up how the estate divided public from private.

Visiting the Main House

The Arai Family Residence Main House can be visited on group tours arranged with the owners and on the free open day each autumn, when the buildings and garden are open to walk around (checked September 27, 2026). The kitchen studio inside is a rental space, booked through a screened membership system.

The official site does not say which rooms of the main house are included in a tour. If you hope to see the living rooms or the old kitchen area, ask when you apply.

Photography rules are not published either, so check on the day.