Former Matsui Family Villa (Ganko Rokusanen) Main Building

A 1920 timber house built to face its garden

A ridge tablet fixes the date of the main house at Ganko Rokusan-en to the ninth year of Taisho, 1920. The building covers about 357 square meters as a single-story timber structure with a two-story wing, roofed mostly in tile with passages of copper sheet. It sits at the center of a roughly 6,600-square-meter property in the Horidome district of Wakayama City, the country villa of Matsui Isuke (1865-1931), a speculator from Hashimoto who built a fortune on the Osaka commodity exchanges and was known there as the Imataiko of Kitahama.

The plan reads as three linked blocks. An entrance block carries a formal shikidai step-up porch; a reception block of guest rooms extends to its south; a two-story block stands to the west and rear. The house turns its face east toward the approach, then opens generously to the south, where the garden lies. Verandas run along that southern edge and the windows are set wide, so that almost every principal room borrows the pond and planting as part of its outlook.

Why it carries cultural-property status

In 2012 the house was entered on the national register of Tangible Cultural Properties, one of ten buildings of the estate listed together on the same day. The registration criterion cites a contribution to the historic landscape of the nation. What the assessors valued is plain to a visitor: a residence of unusual size held to a single, restrained design language, with its early form well preserved. Rather than crowd the rooms with ornament, the builders let proportion, timber, and the framing of garden views do the work.

What to look for inside

The entrance sets the tone. Overhead runs a funazoko, or boat-bottom, ceiling worked in Yakusugi cedar from Yakushima; underfoot sits a large shoe-removing stone of blue-green local stone. Deeper in, one room departs from the Japanese scheme entirely: a Japanese-Western reception room with a marble fireplace, a copper-framed mirror, and fabric-lined walls. The guest rooms each carry the name of a place in Wakayama, such as Kada or Katsuura.

Walk the corridors and the old hand-blown glass in the outer screens throws a faint, moving shimmer across the floor on a sunny day. The two-room southern suite is regarded as the highest in rank. Because the house now operates as a restaurant, these rooms are seen from the inside, over a meal, rather than from behind a rope.