Kitahama Nagaya

A Two-Unit Row House Between a Road and a River

Kitahama Nagaya (北浜長屋, Kitahama Row House) is a timber two-unit row house at 74 Kitahama 1-chome in Chuo Ward, Osaka, completed in 1912 and entered on Japan's national register of tangible cultural properties on 2 November 2018. It has a building footprint of 108 square metres over two storeys and a basement, roofed in tile.

The plan is unusually shallow and unusually exposed. Its south face meets Tosabori-dori; its north face meets the Tosabori River. Nothing stands behind it. A nagaya is a row house of units sharing party walls, the standard urban housing type of pre-modern and early modern Japan, and this one holds two units, each about two and a half ken wide (roughly 4.5 metres), giving a combined frontage of five ken and a depth of around five and a half.

The reason it sits where it does is a tram line. In 1911 the Osaka municipal tram was extended to Kitahama and Tosabori-dori was widened to take it. Buildings caught between the new road and the river had their frontages cut back, surrendered land, and rebuilt. Kitahama Nagaya went up in that reconstruction, finished in 1912. So did the brick Kitahama Retro Building, two doors west, in the same year. One road-widening produced two buildings that could hardly look less alike.

Black Plaster, a Pediment, and a Wall of Glass at the Back

The street face is built as a misegura, a storehouse construction adapted to combined shop and dwelling use. The second storey is finished in kuro-shikkui, black lime plaster laid over a thick okabe wall that buries the timber frame completely. Fire was the logic. Plaster over a heavy wall keeps flame out, and the windows carry kannon-biraki double-leaf shutters whose edges are cut in stepped rebates called kakego, so that when closed they seal against the frame instead of leaving a straight gap. At each end of the facade stands a sode-udatsu, a short projecting fire wall rising past the eaves.

Then, above the ground-floor entrance, a pediment. A triangular classical pediment, on a black-plastered Japanese storehouse front.

That single gesture sets the tone for the whole building. Rooms facing the street were finished in Western style on both floors; rooms at the back were laid out as Japanese washitsu with tatami. The ceiling of the second-floor front room, which served as a reception room, is a pressed metal ceiling of stamped sheet, and the architect who led the recent restoration has said the panels were imported at the time of construction. Stamped metal ceilings were a North American and British commercial fashion of the period; finding one behind a black-plaster facade in Osaka is the sort of detail that makes the building difficult to file under a single style.

The river side is different again. It is glazed almost completely across, wall to wall, with no plaster or shutters. The basement once opened directly onto the water, and goods were loaded and unloaded from boats moored at the back. A building with a fireproof face to the road and a glass face to the river is a building that knew exactly which side its risks and its business came from.

Registered in 2018, Reopened Before That

Registration came late, and it came after the rescue. The Agency for Cultural Affairs registered Kitahama Nagaya on 2 November 2018 under the criterion for structures contributing to the historic character of the national landscape, with register number 27-0752, in the ninety-first round of registrations. Compare its neighbour: Kitahama Retro Building carries number 27-0029 from the seventh round, twenty-one years earlier. The row house spent those two decades unregistered, shuttered for long stretches, its ground floor behind a metal roller door, in a location where a developer's arithmetic pointed one way only.

The turn came in 2016, when structural reinforcement and repair were carried out with support from a City of Osaka conservation subsidy programme, under the design supervision of the architect Takaoka Shinichi. The Agency for Cultural Affairs record lists alterations in the Showa 40s (the late 1960s and early 1970s) and again in 2016. The renovated building opened to the public on 11 October 2017 under the collective name Come to the River, and registration followed the year after.

The order matters. This is not a building that was protected and then found a use. It found a use, survived, and was then recognised. The Agency's own description calls it a valuable historical element in a district under continuing redevelopment, which reads less like praise than like a note of what nearly happened.

Practically: the east unit is occupied by a curry restaurant, the Osaka branch of a business that began in Kamakura, and the west unit by a specialty coffee shop. Two other tenants that opened in the first years, a shop for Indian crafts in the basement and a lifestyle-goods space upstairs, have since closed, so the line-up is worth checking before a visit. There is no admission charge and no formal tour, and the Osaka cultural property register notes that viewing requires an enquiry. In practice, seeing the interior means eating or drinking there. Seats by the north windows give the river view and, at the right hour, the reflection of the metal ceiling in the glass. The building has also opened for guided viewing during the annual Ikenchiku Festival Osaka in autumn, which is the one reliable chance to be shown around rather than seated.

From outside, look for the sode-udatsu at both ends, the stepped shutter edges, and the pediment over the door. Kitahama Station exit 26 is two minutes away, and Nakanoshima Park with its rose garden is straight across the water.