Ikedaya Residence Main Building

The House an Architect Built for Himself

Ikedaya Residence Main Building (池田谷家住宅主屋, Ikedaya-ke Jūtaku Omoya) is a single-storey wooden house 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. Its designer, Ikedaya Hisakichi (池田谷久吉, 1897-1956), was born in Izumisano and built this house as his own home.

Ikedaya trained at the Osaka Municipal Technical School, worked for the Osaka prefectural government, then opened his own practice in the Nishi ward of Osaka city. Temples and shrines were his main line of work. He handled the relocation design of the Onshi Kōdō lecture hall at Kanshinji temple in Kawachinagano, a building later designated an Important Cultural Property, and his portfolio also includes the Konkōkyō Tamamizu church hall, the Naritasan Fudōson temple in Neyagawa, and the 1951 reconstruction of the keep at Kishiwada Castle in steel-reinforced concrete. He was a local historian as well, and spent years surveying old buildings.

For himself, he built no second storey.

The house has a hipped roof (yosemune-zukuri) covered in sangawara pantiles, and a footprint of 156 square metres. An extension was added in 1949, so the dates in the official record already tell you this was a house lived in and altered rather than preserved as a showpiece. What catches the eye from the street is the band of white lime plaster, called shikkui, set into the wall directly beneath the eaves. It is taller than a plasterer would normally leave it. The result is a long pale stripe running under a deep shadow line, and it keeps a low, wide, one-storey elevation from reading as flat.

What Registration Recognises

Japan runs two parallel systems for protecting historic buildings, and the difference matters when reading about this house. Designation, which produces National Treasures and Important Cultural Properties, selects a small number of buildings and protects them tightly through a permit system. Registration, introduced by an amendment to the Law for the Protection of Cultural Properties that took effect on 1 October 1996, works through notification and advice instead. It was created to cast a wide net over modern buildings that were disappearing before anyone had time to assess them, and it lets an owner keep living in and using the property.

Ikedaya Residence Main Building was registered under the criterion of contributing to the historic landscape of the country. Its registration number is 27-0272, in the 41st round of registrations, recorded on 2 March 2004 and gazetted on 29 March of the same year. The storehouse on the same plot, Ikedaya Residence Storehouse (registration number 27-0273), was registered on the same date, and the two are best understood as a pair.

The interest of the building lies in what a shrine-and-temple specialist carried across into domestic work. Deep eaves, a tall plaster frieze, a tea room framed with salvaged temple timber: this is vocabulary from religious architecture, brought down to the scale of one family's house and set into an ordinary Izumisano street without friction. As a surviving example of a professional architect's own home in a provincial Japanese city, it documents something that rarely gets recorded.

The Plan, and a Three-Mat Tea Room

The layout reads clearly. The entrance sits on the north side, and from there a sequence of Japanese-style guest rooms runs south. The family's everyday living rooms occupy the middle of the plan, with the kitchen and bathing areas gathered along the west. Visitors enter from the north and are received at the far south end; daily life happens in between. Circulation and function line up without any display of ingenuity, which is itself worth noticing in a house designed by someone who could have shown off.

Just east of the entrance is a three-mat tea room, roughly five square metres, framed with timber salvaged from temple buildings. An architect involved in repairing and relocating religious structures handles good old wood as a matter of course, and here he took some of it home. Three mats is close to the smallest a tea room gets. Knowing where the posts and beams came from changes how the space feels, in a way that has nothing to do with its size.

One practical point before planning a visit. The house is a private residence and the interior is not open to the public. There is no published viewing programme. Look at the exterior from the public road, do not enter the grounds, and keep photography respectful of the people who live there.

The site lies about 350 metres west of Izumisano Station on the Nankai Main Line, roughly a five-minute walk through a quiet residential grid. That station is two stops and about ten minutes from Kansai International Airport on the Nankai Airport Line, which puts the house within easy reach of a layover. Walk 500 metres north and you enter Sano Machiba, a district that keeps its Edo-period street pattern. There the former Niigawa Residence, a city-designated cultural property, operates as the Izumisano Furusato Machiya Museum and is open to visitors, though opening days and hours have varied and are worth confirming in advance. A modern architect's own home and an early-modern soy sauce brewer's townhouse, within walking distance of each other.