Suzuki Family Residence Main Building

An Architect's Own House, Built in 1947

Suzukike Jutaku Shuoku (鈴木家住宅主屋, also romanised Suzuki-ke Jūtaku Shuoku, the main building of the Suzuki family residence) is a single-storey timber house at Yokoderacho in Shinjuku Ward, Tokyo, built in 1947 and listed as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property (登録有形文化財) on 25 July 2011. The Agency for Cultural Affairs records one building of wood construction under a tiled roof, with a footprint of 116 square metres and remodelling carried out in 1953.

The date is the first thing worth holding onto. In 1947 Tokyo was two years out of the firebombing that had erased whole wards, cement and steel were rationed, and most of what went up was temporary. This house was not. According to the local preservation group that documents registered buildings in the Kagurazaka district, it was built as the home and studio of the architect Takahashi Hiroshi, who had trained in London and opened his practice in Kagurazaka during the early Showa years.

It faces north onto a lane. The ridge runs front to back, so the street sees a gable end, roofed in sangawara pantile, with a deep geya, a lower lean-to roof, running across the whole front. That geya is the reason the house reads as low and horizontal from a few metres away: the eaves come down close, shading the frontage and pulling the building toward the ground.

Lattice, Brick and the Marks of an Adze

Inside, the plan follows the naka-roka type, arranged around a central corridor, with the living room, dining room and other rooms placed along the eastern and southern sides. The central-corridor plan had entered Japanese domestic architecture in the Taisho period as a way of giving rooms independence, replacing the older arrangement in which one room opened directly into the next. By 1947 it was standard for a house of this class.

The elevation stays within a Japanese register. Koshido, wooden lattice doors, close the front. Then the architect broke the pattern twice. The entrance is faced in brick, a material with no place in a traditional Japanese house front. And structural members carry a nakuri finish, worked over with a hand adze so that the surface holds a rhythm of shallow scallops instead of being planed smooth.

Nakuri is deliberate roughness. A carpenter capable of a flawless planed surface chooses instead to leave the tool's signature, and the result reads as both rustic and expensive, since only a skilled hand produces an even rhythm. On a house built during a material shortage, by an architect who employed his own carpenters, the choice looks less like decoration than like a statement about what the trade could still do.

The registration criterion applied here is that the building contributes to the historic landscape of the country. Its registration number is 13-0281, from the seventieth round of registrations; registration and the ministerial notice both carry the date of 25 July 2011. Registration under the system introduced by the 1996 amendment to the Law for the Protection of Cultural Properties covers, in practice, the exterior as seen from the road, and imposes notification requirements rather than the permit regime that governs Important Cultural Properties.

Takahashi's work in these streets did not stop here. The former Takahashi Architectural Office building in Yaraicho, now the Ayumi Gallery, is separately registered, and Issuiryo, put up in 1951 nearby as a dormitory for the carpenters who worked for the practice, is said also to have been his design and later joined the register. Three buildings by one architect, within a few minutes' walk of each other, is unusual in a city that has rebuilt itself as often as Tokyo has.

Walking the Kagurazaka Backstreets

The house is a private residence. The interior is closed, there is no admission charge and no opening hours, and the preservation group that catalogues these buildings notes the closure explicitly. What the street gives you is the north elevation: the gable, the deep eaves of the geya, the lattice, the brick around the entrance.

Yokoderacho sits on the eastern slope of the Kagurazaka district, in a grid of lanes too narrow for through traffic. Temples remain scattered through the area, and the lanes wind rather than run straight, which is why this quarter kept its texture while the main roads around it were widened and rebuilt.

Yaraicho Noh Theatre stands a short walk away and is also registered, as is the Kengyo no Ma room at the Miyagi Michio Memorial Hall in Nakacho, preserving the study of the composer and koto player who reshaped Japanese music in the twentieth century. The former Tokiwaya, an old machiai building on Kagurazaka 3-chome, completes a compact circuit of registered structures that can be walked comfortably in an hour.

For access, Ushigome-Kagurazaka Station on the Toei Oedo Line is about five minutes on foot, and Kagurazaka Station on the Tokyo Metro Tozai Line roughly ten. Iidabashi, served by four lines, sits at the bottom of the slope. Kagurazaka itself is one of the more rewarding evening walks in central Tokyo: stone-paved alleys, restaurants behind wooden fences, and a French community that has grown up around the Institut Francais.

Photographing the exterior from the lane is not restricted, though people live here and the lanes are narrow enough that a group with cameras blocks them entirely. Keep moving, and keep to the public road.