Kobatake Family Residence Detached Wing

A guest wing across the yard from the main house

The Kobatake Family Residence Detached Wing (古畑家住宅離れ, Kobatake-ke Jūtaku Hanare) is a single-storey timber building in the Nakahata district of Takatsuki, Osaka Prefecture, built in the closing years of the Taisho era (1912-1925) and entered on the national register of Tangible Cultural Properties on 8 July 2008.

It occupies the southwest corner of the Kobatake compound, set across the open yard from the main house. On paper the dimensions are unremarkable: 10 metres along the ridge, 7.0 metres in depth, 74 square metres of floor. The interest lies in how that floor is divided.

Rooms run in two parallel rows, one to the north and one to the south. Both begin at the east end with a doma, the earth-floored working space standard in Japanese farm buildings, continue into a tsugi-no-ma or anteroom, and finish in a principal room at the west. Two routes through one building, running side by side, each arriving somewhere different.

Above them sits an irimoya roof, hipped along the lower slopes and gabled at the ridge, laid with sangawara pantiles.

Registered as a model of form

The Detached Wing is a Registered Tangible Cultural Property, the lighter of Japan's two national systems for historic buildings, under which owners keep considerable freedom to live in and adapt what they own.

Registration proceeds under one of three criteria. The Detached Wing entered under the first, which covers buildings serving as a model of form, and carries registration number 27-0486. The Agency for Cultural Affairs treats it as a good instance of the detached reception room in a large modern farmhouse.

The judgement rests on the contrast between the two rows.

The principal room of the southern row carries zashiki-kazari, the built-in fittings that mark a space as formal reception room: typically an alcove for a hanging scroll, staggered shelving beside it, and a shallow desk recess set into the wall. The northern row is handled in sukiya style instead, the lighter idiom that came out of the tea room, favouring slender members, unpainted natural surfaces, and a deliberate asymmetry that departs from the rules governing formal shoin design.

One building, two grades of reception room, with a shared roof over both. The household could seat a caller in whichever register the occasion asked for.

The registration was decided on 8 July 2008 and announced in the official gazette on 23 July, in the sixtieth round of registrations.

Visiting

The Kobatake Family Residence Detached Wing is still part of a lived-in family home. Its interior is not open, there are no open days or special viewings, and no admission is charged.

The wing stands in the southwest corner of the compound, facing the main house across the yard. From the public road along the eastern edge of the property it lies behind the gatehouse, the storehouses and the main house, so it is hard to see from outside at all. What makes the building significant, the contrast between its two rows of reception rooms, is in any case a matter of interior fittings. Read the plan here, and on site be content with the view of the household as a whole from the lane.