Kawaguchi Family Residence Reception Room

About the Kawaguchi Family Residence Reception Room

The Kawaguchi Family Residence Reception Room (川口家住宅応接間, Kawaguchi-ke Jūtaku Ōsetsuma) is a single-storey Western-style guest wing joined to the front west corner of the main house on the Kawaguchi estate in Nishiniunozu, Aridagawa Town, Wakayama Prefecture, built in 1968 and registered as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property in 2018.

The Kawaguchi Family Residence Reception Room faces east and measures 3.5 ken by 2 ken (a ken is about 1.8 m), with a building area of 29 m². Under a gabled roof of Western-pattern tiles are a reception room and a smaller adjoining room. A corridor links it to the main house, and it was normally entered from that side.

A Postwar Parlour Built on Its Own

The national database calls the Kawaguchi Family Residence Reception Room an example of a free-standing Western-style reception room of the postwar period, and it was registered as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property under the same criterion as the main house: as a model of design.

What makes it distinctive is the decision to build the parlour as a separate wing rather than fit a Western room into the Japanese house. Completed in 1968, it is the youngest of the five registered parts of the Kawaguchi Family Residence, and it was registered in 2018, the year it turned fifty.

It was not only for guests. Wakayama Prefecture notes that a former head of the household taught piano here, and the small Japanese-style room attached to it served as a study.

Coloured Render and a Marble Fireplace

The walls of the Kawaguchi Family Residence Reception Room are Ōkabe, with the posts hidden, and finished in sprayed coloured mortar. With the Western tiles on the roof, the wing reads quite differently from the main house beside it. There is also a tiled terrace.

Inside, the database highlights two features. One is a set of unusually tall glazed doors. The other is a fireplace piece made of marble, shaped like a hearth and set into the reception room.

Put together, a mortar-walled parlour tucked against a tiled Taisho farmhouse shows how one rural family chose to receive visitors in the late 1960s.

Seeing the Kawaguchi Family Residence Reception Room

The Kawaguchi Family Residence Reception Room is privately owned and has no public opening days. The estate is leased to a social welfare corporation for employment support, and whether the room with the glazed doors and marble fireplace piece can be seen depends on that use.

The Kawaguchi Family Residence Reception Room sits in the southwest of the estate, close to the prefectural road, so going by the layout it is one of the easier buildings to see from outside. Look for the coloured walls and Western tiles next to the older roof of the main house. Stay on the road and do not enter the grounds. Directions are on the Kawaguchi Family Residence page.