Ikedaya Residence Storehouse

Seventeen Square Metres, Attached to the House

Ikedaya Residence Storehouse (池田谷家住宅蔵, Ikedaya-ke Jūtaku Kura) is a two-storey wooden outbuilding in the Ōnishi district of Izumisano, Osaka Prefecture, built around 1927 and entered on Japan's register of Registered Tangible Cultural Properties on 2 March 2004, on the same day as the main house it adjoins. Its footprint measures 17 square metres, about the area of ten tatami mats.

It stands at the west end of the main house's north face, attached to the wall rather than set apart in the garden. An earth-floored passage, a doma, runs between the two, so the outbuilding can be reached from inside the home. The roof is gabled and covered in sangawara pantiles. The designer was Ikedaya Hisakichi (池田谷久吉, 1897-1956), the Izumisano-born architect who built the main house as his own residence, which makes this a small building a professional put up for his own use.

On a plan of the property it is clearly the supporting player. Yet it is the only part of the compound with an upper floor, and that turns out to matter.

A Kura That Is Not a Dozō

The Japanese name calls it a kura, a storehouse, but the construction is timber frame. A true dozō, the classic Japanese storehouse, is built up in thick layers of earth plaster over a hidden frame, largely as fireproofing. This building is not made that way. It borrows the look instead: a plastered band called a hachimaki wraps around the upper part of the walls, giving the silhouette the horizontal accent that reads, at a glance, as a storehouse.

The windows are where the building shows its date. Sliding glass windows fitted with wooden lattice screens open in the walls, and they are wide, one ken across, roughly 1.8 metres. For a domestic outbuilding of the late 1920s that is a generous opening, and the light it lets in runs against everything the word storehouse suggests. The lattice keeps the security and the visual calm that a plain sheet of glass would lose. Wood and glass side by side, in those proportions, place the building firmly in early Shōwa Japan.

One adjustment is easy to miss. The tiled pent roof over the ground floor is set at the same height as the eaves of the main house. Two separate structures, different roof forms, different pitches, tied together by a single shared horizontal line. Someone who spent his career composing temple and shrine precincts, where buildings have to read as a group, would think in exactly this way.

The Study Upstairs

The division of use inside is straightforward. The ground floor served as storage. Above it sits a room of about six mats, floored in wide boards rather than tatami, used as a study. A room for reading and writing, stacked on a room for keeping things.

That arrangement reads differently once you know something about Ikedaya Hisakichi. Alongside his practice in temple and shrine architecture, he worked as a local historian and spent years on surveys of old buildings. Drawing was one half of his working life; reading documents and compiling records was the other. The desk for the second half stood up here, one earth-floored passage away from family life. The unusually wide windows make sense in that light. This was a room that needed daylight on a work surface.

His reputation has kept growing since his death. In 2019 a commemorative volume on his life as an architect and local historian was published with the cooperation of his eldest son and his wife, and in 2021 a regional branch of the Osaka Association of Architects held a lecture on him, paired with a walking tour of the Sano Machiba district and the Izumisano Furusato Machiya Museum.

The same constraint applies here as to the main house. This is an outbuilding of a private residence, the interior is not open, and no viewing programme is published. Because it attaches to the north side of the house, even the exterior is only partly visible from the street. Keep to the public road and stay off the property. The site is about 350 metres west of Izumisano Station on the Nankai Main Line, a walk of roughly five minutes, and that station is two stops and about ten minutes from Kansai International Airport on the Nankai Airport Line. For a historic building in the area that can actually be entered, the Izumisano Furusato Machiya Museum, housed in the city-designated former Niigawa Residence about 500 metres north, is open to visitors; opening days and hours have varied, so confirm before going.