Okuno Family Residence Main House

A main house in the northern Kawachi manner

Okuno Family Residence Main House (奥野家住宅主屋, Okuno-ke Jūtaku Shuoku) is a farmhouse in Kasugamotomachi, Hirakata, Osaka Prefecture, built in the last decades of the Edo period, about 1830 to 1868, and registered as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property of Japan on May 2, 2017, under number 27-0668.

It stands in the northern part of the plot, facing south: a single-storey timber house with a partial upper floor under a tiled roof, covering 262 square meters. Work was done on it around 1902 and again around 1968, so a late-Edo frame carries layers from the Meiji and Shōwa eras.

The gatehouse and three storehouses were registered on the same day, which makes the Okuno Family Residence Main House the centre of a five-building homestead.

A nine-bay core and its additions

The core of the Okuno Family Residence Main House measures 9 by 5 bays. To its east the builders added a Buddhist altar room and a formal reception room; to the rear they attached a wing projecting at right angles. The logic is easy to follow: ritual and hospitality pushed out to the east, work and storage to the north.

The whole western half of the plan is a Doma, a vast earth-floored work area. The raised floor follows a regular four-room layout, the rooms set out like the four squares of a window pane. At the front is an entrance with a Shikidai, a raised board step for receiving guests of rank, quite separate from the everyday door into the earthen floor.

The added reception room was not built on the cheap. The agency notes the quality of its fittings and the variety of its Ranma, the carved or latticed transom panels above the sliding doors. A family that insisted on refinement even in an extension was a family with a position to keep.

Why it was registered

The Okuno Family Residence Main House was registered under the criterion of contributing to the historic landscape of the country, with the agency describing it as a record of the form taken by upper-tier farmhouses in northern Kawachi.

The wide earthen floor, the tidy four-room layout, the formal entrance, the altar and reception rooms to the east and the rear wing all sit within one building. Together they show a prosperous farming household that kept its work space and its receiving rooms under the same roof. The alterations of around 1902 and 1968 add another layer: this was a house that kept being lived in and adapted.

What to look for

The key to reading the Okuno Family Residence Main House is the ratio of earthen floor to raised floor. Giving over half the house to the doma tells you how much farm work once happened indoors.

Next, look for where the eastern rooms meet the core. Additions to a farmhouse usually leave seams in the roof line or the run of a wall, and tracing that join is the simplest way to separate the late-Edo body of the house from what was added later.

Visiting

The Okuno Family Residence Main House is a private residence and its interior is not open. Set back in the northern part of the plot, it is hard to see as a whole from the road, and as of September 2026 we found no announcements of open days. Please do not enter the grounds, and keep the residents in mind. Directions to the homestead are on the Okuno Family Residence (Hirakata) page.