Nagase Takao Family Residence Brick Storehouse

What the Nagase Takao Family Residence Brick Storehouse Is

The Nagase Takao Family Residence Brick Storehouse (永瀬孝男家住宅煉瓦蔵) is a two-storey brick-and-timber tool store of about 1911 in Honmachi 1-chome, Kawaguchi City, Saitama Prefecture, listed as Registered Tangible Cultural Property on 29 March 2019. It stands just west of the former power plant and covers 19 square metres, the smallest of the seven structures on the estate.

The roof is gabled on a north-south ridge with pantiles, Sangawara-buki, and the building is entered from the gable end, Tsumairi, with the doorway at the centre of the north face. For a footprint of 19 square metres, the elevation reads as unexpectedly vertical.

What it held was tools. A separate storehouse on the same grounds took household property, so the two stores were divided by function. The Nagase Takao Family Residence Brick Storehouse belongs to the working side of a foundry household.

Why It Was Listed

The Nagase Takao Family Residence Brick Storehouse was listed for its contribution to the historic character of the landscape. The Agency for Cultural Affairs entry places its value in conveying how a modern foundry family's residence was put together. It was assessed as part of an arrangement in which home and trade shared one plot, rather than on its own architectural merits.

The interesting thing is that a brick building here refuses to look like one. The shell is laid in English bond, English bond, but the outer face is plastered in Shikkui lime to resemble a traditional thick-walled storehouse. By about 1911 brick can hardly have been an unfamiliar material in Kawaguchi, and yet the exterior was pulled back toward the older idiom.

The bonding can be read as a sequence. The former power plant on the same grounds dates from about 1900 and is Flemish bond; this storehouse dates from about 1911 and is English bond. Within eleven years the household changed the way it laid brick. That shift matches the wider movement of Japanese brickwork toward English bond, and it is unusual to find both stages preserved on a single plot.

What to Look For

Enjoy the mismatch between surface and structure. The Nagase Takao Family Residence Brick Storehouse presents white lime walls under a gabled pantile roof, the picture of a conventional storehouse. Peel back one layer and the shell is brick. Choosing not to show the brick is the opposite of what was done next door at the former power plant, where the masonry is left bare, so two attitudes stand side by side on the same grounds.

The gable-end entry can be checked from outside. The doorway opens on the north face and the triangular gable wall rises directly above it. Storehouses are often entered from the long side instead, so a gable-entered store reads taller in outline.

Inside, posts stand at half-Ken intervals, roughly 0.9 metres, and both floors are boarded. On a floor of 19 square metres that spacing puts a great deal of timber into a small volume. The brick-and-timber method shows itself not only in the walls but in the rhythm of the posts.

Visiting

The Nagase Takao Family Residence Brick Storehouse stands on private ground and the interior is closed. The owner's introductory site lists no visiting hours and no booking procedure (checked 13 September 2026). The store cannot be entered.

As for the exterior, its position west of the former power plant in the southeast of the grounds means that from the road you get the gable roof and the upper part of the gable wall above the brick boundary wall. Being two storeys it clears the wall better than the single-storey power plant does, but the plastered walls cannot be seen whole from outside.

A caution about the name. The history published by the owner uses renga-gura, brick storehouse, for the building that housed the prefecture's first electric lighting business. In the Agency for Cultural Affairs database that building is listed separately as the former power plant, and the Nagase Takao Family Residence Brick Storehouse means the English-bond tool store of 19 square metres. When matching names against signage or other sources, check which usage is meant.

Directions to the estate and the conditions for seeing it are set out on the Nagase Takao Family Residence page.