Nishiyama Family Residence Western-Style Building

What Is the Nishiyama Family Residence Western-Style Building?

The Nishiyama Family Residence Western-Style Building (西山家住宅洋館, Nishiyama-ke Jūtaku Yōkan) is a small single-storey wooden house in Western style, built in the early Taishō era (1912 to 1925) and remodeled in 1939, in the southern part of the Nishiyama Family Residence in Okamachiminami, Toyonaka City, Osaka Prefecture, registered as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property of Japan in 2007.

Its building area is 31 square meters. The national record describes a metal-sheet roof and a tall base whose underfloor space serves as storage. A Western-style room of about 10 tatami mats fills the south side, a study of about 3 mats lies on the northwest, and the entrance is in the northeast corner. Steps link it to the northwest end of the detached wing. The registration number is 27-0434.

Toyonaka City's preservation plan dates the building to 1914, and the city's own description says it was built by the Takenaka construction company. The Nishiyama family added it as a separate annex south of the main house within a few years of moving in.

Why the Western-Style Building Was Registered

The Nishiyama Family Residence Western-Style Building became a Registered Tangible Cultural Property on December 5, 2007, under the criterion for structures that contribute to the historic landscape of the nation.

Toyonaka City notes that suburban families of the time often built a small Western-style annex alongside a Japanese-style main house, and that this is one such example. Apart from later changes such as the entrance, it survives much as it was, down to the furniture. Seen from the garden, it is the one Western face among the Japanese-style wing and corridor, and it changes the character of the whole view.

What to Look For at the Western-Style Building

A small roof on a garden mound

The Nishiyama Family Residence Western-Style Building was set on top of an earth mound in the garden. A photograph taken before the 1940 redesign shows a stepping-stone path climbing the mound to its door. When Mirei Shigemori reworked the garden, he banked soil against the foot of the building and the corridor and set stones large and small around it, so that the house seems to grow out of the slope.

The roof is hipped over an L-shaped ridge, with a half-gable on the north face only. Toyonaka City describes it as a combination of hip and mansard forms, small but intricate, with the eave line strongly drawn. Paired brackets line up beneath the eaves.

The 1939 makeover

The building originally had a balcony on its east side. In 1939 Takao Okada, of the Mitsukoshi department store's Osaka housing division, removed it and transformed the interior. The windows became casements glazed with cut glass in an Art Deco manner, and the new entrance received a pair of unequal flush doors. Outside, the lower part of the east wall is finished in washed pebble render and the other faces in mortar scored with horizontal joints.

The study and its furnishings

Inside, look for the mantelpiece, designed to frame an electric heater, with a panel of inlaid wood showing trees and birds above it, and for the parquet floor tiles. The study projecting to the north was originally the entrance hall; it has built-in furniture and windows cut with an intricate floral pattern. According to the preservation plan, most of the furnishings were delivered in one batch at about the time Shigemori began work on the garden, and the interior sketches and perspective drawings made for them also survive. Together they show how a fashionable room of the 1930s was planned and furnished.

Visiting the Western-Style Building

The Nishiyama Family Residence Western-Style Building stands inside the walls and is not open on a regular basis. Toyonaka City completed its repairs by the end of fiscal 2025, and anyone joining a city event or tour can see the exterior from the garden. Access to the interior depends on the event, so check when you apply (checked October 2, 2026).

The best views of the exterior are from partway along the corridor that climbs south from the main house, or looking up from the veranda of the detached wing. From either spot you can see how the building sits on its mound, a step above the garden. Photography rules are set for each event. Directions are on the Nishiyama Family Residence page.