Teruta Family Main Building

A 1953 House in a District That Had to Be Rebuilt

The Teruta Family Residence Main Building (照田家住宅主屋, read Teruta-ke Jutaku Shuoku) is a timber house of 1953 standing in Midori, Sumida City, Tokyo, entered on Japan's national Register of Tangible Cultural Properties on 8 July 2008. It is single-storey with a two-storey portion, roofed in tile, and covers a building area of 150 square metres.

The date deserves a moment. Midori lies in what was the Honjo district, one of the areas most heavily damaged in the air raids of March 1945. Eight years separate that destruction from the completion of this house. Timber, tile, tea room, garden: the choices made here were not the choices of a city in a hurry.

The house sits at the centre of its plot with a garden laid out to the south. Its plan is additive rather than unified. A reception and formal room wing of two storeys under an irimoya, or hip-and-gable, roof forms the core, and single-storey wings attach to it: a tea room wing, an entrance and drawing room wing, and a bath and kitchen wing.

Fine Timber and Quiet Detail: Why It Was Registered

The Agency for Cultural Affairs registered the house under the criterion of being a model of design, one of the three grounds for entry on the register. Its description points to two things: the use of meiboku, choice figured timbers, through the formal rooms and tea room, and a detailing described as fine-grained and restrained.

Meiboku is a specific idea in Japanese building. It means timber selected for the character of its grain, its knots, or its bark edge, chosen for a single named position in a room and often costing more than the structure around it. A house that uses it throughout its formal spaces was built by someone who knew what they were commissioning.

The drawing room breaks with the rest. Its floor is parquet, its posts are finished in naguri, the adzed surface that leaves shallow scallops across the wood, and a tile-paved veranda runs alongside. Adzed posts belong to the sukiya tradition of tea architecture; parquet flooring and a tiled veranda do not. Putting them in one room is a deliberate move, and it is the kind of blending that ran through better residential work in the years around 1950, when Japanese and western spaces were being fitted into a single household plan rather than kept in separate wings.

Ownership has since passed to a corporate trustee, Sekisui House Trust, and the property is maintained rather than lived in as a family home. Registration, unlike designation as an Important Cultural Property, imposes a light regulatory touch, which has allowed the house to change hands and still be looked after.

Normally Closed, Occasionally Open

The house is not open to the public. The site fronts a public road, but a concrete wall runs along the boundary, and from the street only the upper storey rises into view above it. Anyone travelling specifically to see this building on an ordinary day will be disappointed, and it is better to know that in advance.

There is one route in. Sumida City runs a guided viewing of the Teruta Residence as a project event within Tokyo Heritage Week, the metropolitan programme that opens normally closed cultural properties each autumn. Recent editions have been held on a single Saturday in two sessions of about two hours each, led by a specialist from the city office who explains the joinery, fittings, and light fixtures room by room.

Places are scarce. Recent rounds have taken five or six applicants per session by lottery, with a nominal fee, applications closing several weeks ahead through an online form or a reply-paid postcard to the Cultural Properties Section of Sumida City's Regional Education Support Division. Dates and terms shift from year to year, so the city's event pages are the thing to watch from around late summer.

If the timing does not work, the surrounding area still rewards the trip. Ryogoku, with the Edo-Tokyo Museum area and the sumo stadium, lies within walking distance to the north, and the Honjo streets around Midori carry a scattering of post-war buildings that make the context of this house legible.