Tsutsui Family Residence Tea Room

What Is the Tsutsui Family Residence Tea Room?

The Tsutsui Family Residence Tea Room (筒井家住宅茶室, Tsutsui-ke Jūtaku Chashitsu) is a small tea house attached to the northeast of the zashiki wing on the Tsutsui estate in Nakamozucho, Kita-ku, Sakai City, Osaka; dated by the national register to the late Edo period, it became a Registered Tangible Cultural Property on April 3, 2020.

The single-storey timber building covers just 13 square meters. Its pan-tiled roof (Sangawara-buki) is hipped at the north end and gabled at the south, and a lower copper-clad roof drops down on the south side. Inside, the tea space lies to the north and a preparation room (Mizuya) to the south.

Why It Was Registered: A Roof Shaped by the Room

The Tsutsui Family Residence Tea Room was registered as a model of form. The Agency for Cultural Affairs singles out how an irregular floor plan gives the building a lively, varied exterior, and calls it a refined tea room.

Sakai City explains that the roof took its complicated shape from the relationship between the host's mat and the alcove. Hip, gable and a stepped-down lean-to all meet over this one small room, so the seating inside can almost be read from the outside.

What to Look For: Three and a Half Mats and a Noble's Door

The tea space is a sanjō daime room: three full mats plus a daime mat, about three-quarters of a normal length, on which the host prepares tea. The host's place sits at the south of the west wall, and the alcove (Tokonoma) at the north of the east wall, diagonally opposite. Shigeatsu Shimizu's 2025 paper records the standard right-handed arrangement with the hearth cut into the host's mat and the alcove placed at the guests' place of honor.

The only way in is a kinin-guchi, a door with paper sliding panels tall enough to enter standing. There is no nijiri-guchi, the low crawl-through entrance found in many tea rooms, which suggests guests came through from the zashiki wing in a relatively relaxed fashion.

The 3-mat preparation room to the south is where utensils were readied and washed. Because tea space and preparation room each carry their own roof, with the copper lean-to layered on, a building of 13 square meters ends up with a remarkable number of rooflines.

Dating and the Family's Tea Tradition

The national register places the Tsutsui Family Residence Tea Room in the late Edo period and enters 1751 to 1830 in its dates column. Shimizu, judging from weathering of the timbers, suggests the mid-nineteenth century, after the zashiki wing had been remodeled. Both put it in the later Edo period, but the study leans later.

Osaka Cultural Properties Navi notes that the family has followed the Sekishū school of tea, founded by the daimyo Katagiri Sadamasa. That household practice is the likely background to a tea room built as its own small building.

Visiting

The Tsutsui Family Residence Tea Room is part of a private home and is not open to the public. Please do not enter the grounds.

A photograph by Yasushi Ichikawa on the Agency for Cultural Affairs database shows its layered roofs. Access and visiting conditions are covered on the Tsutsui Family Residence page.