Satake Glass Office

The Office That Joins House and Factory

The Satake Glass Office (佐竹ガラス事務所, Satake Garasu Jimusho) is a single-storey timber office building of the early Showa period in Saiwai 2-chome, Izumi City, Osaka Prefecture, entered on the national register as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property on April 24, 2001.

It belongs to Satake Glass, a maker of colored craft-glass rods founded in 1927, and is attached to the northwest side of the main house that holds the southern corner of the site. With a building area of 31 square metres it is the second smallest of the six registered buildings; only the shrine, at 2 square metres, is smaller.

Its hipped roof, finished in Sangawara-buki pantiles, is a Yosemune-zukuri form, and its ridge runs parallel to the main house. Squeezed between the family residence and the furnace sheds, the Satake Glass Office is literally where home ends and work begins.

Why It Was Registered

The Satake Glass Office was listed as a building that contributes to the historic landscape. The Agency for Cultural Affairs describes it as an indispensable part of how the property presents itself to the street.

Izumi City's heritage guide locates the value of Satake Glass in the way its traditional main house and office have been kept together with the factory. The office is what makes that unity visible. Keep only the house and you have an old residence; keep only the sheds and you have a small workshop. Put this modest office between them and the whole thing faces the street as one continuous household-cum-business.

On its own it would hardly stop you. Its value lies in the silhouette: the roofline steps down from the two-storey house to the hipped office roof before the factory begins, and that intermediate step keeps the street view from breaking.

What to Look For

On the street side, the Satake Glass Office pushes a small eave out over its frontage, the kind of canopy that marks the entrance of a traditional shop or counting house. Seen next to the latticed front of the main house, it completes a single, coherent face toward the road.

Look up at the roofs. The main house has a hip-and-gable roof, the office a plain hipped one, yet the two ridges are aligned, so the different forms still read as a pair.

On the side away from the street, according to the official description, a passage about 3 metres wide separates the office from a later extension. It reads as a working corridor for people and materials heading to the factory at the back.

Visiting the Satake Glass Office

No public access to the interior of the Satake Glass Office has been announced. Its street side, with the projecting eave, can be seen from the road in front of the property.

The passage and the extension lie inside the compound and are hard to see from outside. Satake Glass is a working factory, and tours and classes are by reservation, so please don't enter the premises unannounced. If you want to photograph the buildings, ask when you book.