Tsuchiya Family Residence Main House

What the Tsuchiya Family Residence Main House Is

The Tsuchiya Family Residence Main House (土屋家住宅主屋, Tsuchiya-ke Jūtaku Shuoku) is a wooden farmhouse built between 1868 and 1882, in the early Meiji era, in Enzan-Mikkaichiba, Koshu City, Yamanashi Prefecture, and listed as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property on 2 May 2017. It has 2 storeys, rising in part to 3 and 4, under a tiled roof, with a building area of 232 square metres. Family tradition says it was built by the great-grandfather of the present head of the household.

What stops you is the roof. Above the second-floor roof rises a raised central section, the tsukiage-yane, that forms a third level, and on top of that sits a ridge lantern, the koshi-yane, forming a fourth. The Agency for Cultural Affairs explains the silhouette simply: it was built for sericulture. Silkworms need steady warmth and constant air, and the effort to pull light and breeze into the upper floors became the outline of the house.

The Tsuchiyas have lived here ever since. The house was renovated three times, in 1960, 1970 and 2003.

Why It Was Listed as a Model of Form

Of the six listed structures at the Tsuchiya Family Residence, only the Tsuchiya Family Residence Main House was registered under the criterion of being a model of form. The gates, wall and storehouses were valued for their contribution to the landscape. Here the judgement was on the shape of the building itself.

That shape is a section through two uses at once. Above ground and first floors where the family lived, layers for silkworms are stacked in the form of roofs. Sericulture farmhouses in the eastern Kofu Basin commonly lift the centre of the roof to ventilate the loft; this house does it twice, raised roof and then lantern, until the building reads as four floors from the outside.

The plan is orderly. The entrance opens in the middle of the front. To its left, as you face the house, three ten-mat rooms run in a line along the front, with a central corridor, the naka-roka, behind them to the north. Three large rooms in a row suggest that the family kept a formal suite for guests on the lower floors even while the upper floors were given over to silkworms.

What to Look For

Step back first and count the roofs of the Tsuchiya Family Residence Main House. Second-floor eaves, then the raised roof, then the lantern at the top: each stage smaller than the one below, so that the farmhouse rises almost like a squat tower. Get too close and the lower eaves hide the upper stages, so the full outline is easier to read from a little distance.

Notice that the two upper roofs are treated as separate floors. Both are devices for admitting light and air, but here each encloses a storey of its own. When silk was being raised, these levels were very likely filled with trays of silkworms.

At the front, locate the central entrance. Knowing that three ten-mat rooms lie to its left lets you read the formal rooms from the pattern of doors and windows outside.

The renovations are part of the story too. Three campaigns between 1960 and 2003 layered later updates, made so the family could keep living here, over an early Meiji frame.

Visiting

The Tsuchiya Family Residence Main House is the Tsuchiya family's home and is closed inside. The formal rooms, the corridor and the former silkworm floors cannot be entered.

What you can see of the exterior depends on what is in view when you visit the shop of the winery that shares the estate. The shop does not offer tours of the cellar buildings or vineyards, and no arrangement for viewing the Tsuchiya Family Residence Main House was found (checked 24 September 2026). Ask the staff how close you may go and whether photographs are welcome before you wander.

Directions to the estate and the shop's opening conditions are on the Tsuchiya Family Residence page.