Tsutsui Family Residence Zashiki Wing

What Is the Tsutsui Family Residence Zashiki Wing?

The Tsutsui Family Residence Zashiki Wing (筒井家住宅座敷棟, Tsutsui-ke Jūtaku Zashikitō) is the reception wing joined to the southeast of the main house on the Tsutsui estate in Nakamozucho, Kita-ku, Sakai City, Osaka; dated by the national register to the mid-Edo period with late-Edo additions, it became a Registered Tangible Cultural Property on April 3, 2020.

The single-storey timber wing faces west and covers 110 square meters. The Agency for Cultural Affairs describes a tiled (Hongawarabuki) gabled roof in the Kirizuma-zukuri style, a formal entrance step (Shikidai) and a projecting wing on the west, and verandas on three sides. Measured by the survey, the wing runs 6 bays long and 2 and a half bays deep, its north 2 bays turning west to meet the main house in an L. The south end is hipped (Irimoya-zukuri), the west end gabled, and part of the roof uses simpler pan tiles (Sangawara-buki).

The register describes the interior as four rooms in two rows, with an earthen-floored corner at the southwest and alcoves in the northeast and southeast rooms.

Why It Was Registered: Refined Rooms in the Sukiya Manner

The Tsutsui Family Residence Zashiki Wing was registered as a model of form. The agency explains that an L-shaped detached dwelling was remodeled, linked to the main house and turned into formal rooms, and praises it as a refined reception wing in the sukiya manner.

Sakai City adds that the wing was first built as living quarters when the family moved its base here and was converted later. It records the moment a working land office acquired a household beside it.

From Family Quarters to Reception Rooms

Shigeatsu Shimizu's 2025 paper reads the alterations closely. Posts in the L-shaped core are polished cedar logs and cedar posts 125 millimeters square, both deeply weathered, far older-looking than the nineteenth-century extension of the main house. This core likely goes back to the eighteenth century and first held just three rooms in an L as family living space.

The shikidai step is a later addition, with new posts set against splints fixed to the old ones, and the entrance room itself seems once to have been outdoors. The evidence: a window in the wall between the entrance room and the inner reception room, and a west roof slope cut back by half a bay.

Shimizu places the original wing between 1681 and 1712, at about the time the main house was rebuilt or soon after. In the first half of the nineteenth century the formal entrance was added and the wing was joined to the main house, giving the estate the dignity of a village headman's residence.

What to Look For: A Clockwise Route through Four Rooms

Today the Tsutsui Family Residence Zashiki Wing has four rooms in a square. On the west, from the south, are the 6-mat O-genkan with the entrance step and the 7 and a half-mat Shichihan; on the east are the 12-mat Oku-zashiki and the 10-mat Zashiki. A small Buddhist altar room of about 2 mats projects north of the Shichihan.

The circulation is the curious part. A solid wall separates the O-genkan from the Oku-zashiki, and sliding doors divide the rest, so a guest stepping up at the entrance must pass clockwise through the O-genkan, Shichihan and Zashiki before reaching the innermost room. Shimizu explains the odd route as a by-product of bolting a formal entrance onto a family wing.

Verandas wrap the east and south sides of the reception rooms, and the tea room is attached at the northeast corner. The sukiya refinement the agency praises is best imagined in that relationship between rooms, veranda and garden.

Visiting

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

Photographs by Yasushi Ichikawa show the entrance step on Osaka Cultural Properties Navi and the west front on the Agency for Cultural Affairs database. Access and visiting conditions for the estate are covered on the Tsutsui Family Residence page.