House In Mibu
HOUSE IN MIBU
Tato Architects
ARCHITECTS
Tato Architects
LEAD ARCHITECTS
Yo Shimada
LEAD TEAM
Yohei Uchino
DESIGN TEAM
Nobuhiko Sato
ENGINEERING & CONSULTING > STRUCTURAL
Tmsd Takashi Manda Structural Design
MANUFACTURERS
Kimikolor, Miratap
PHOTOGRAPHS
Daici Ano
AREA
109 m²
YEAR
2026
LOCATION
Mibu, Japan
CATEGORY
Residential Architecture, Houses
English description provided by the architects.
Through architecture, we inevitably alter the environment.
Yet we are always asking whether that act of alteration might avoid damaging its surroundings, whether it might instead change them in a way that heals.
The site was the rear garden behind the client's parental home in Mibu, a quiet residential town in Tochigi Prefecture; here we designed a two-story timber house for a couple and their three children.
A large barn stood in the garden, used for parking and as a workspace. Though considerably weathered, the barn is to be repaired and put back into use.
Seeking a way for the house to stand without making the garden feel crowded or diminished, we sank the living room about 500 millimeters into the ground and planted its roof with greenery, extending the garden over the house.
The plan is rotated at an angle following the sweep of cars that continue to pass through the garden, creating places where the roof reaches toward the barn and gaps where it pulls away.
The half-sunken living room, embraced by the earth and a low wooden roof, is a quiet space with a sense of shelter.
Yet the side facing the garden opens wide, and sitting down, one finds the ground of the garden spreading out almost at eye level beyond the glass. Sinking into the earth encloses; touching the earth opens.
Enclosure and openness appear simultaneously, as two faces of a single operation.
The second floor, by contrast, is a nest-like composition of small, discrete rooms linked by two staircases, with a raised loft that doubles as a desk and a place to sleep, a counterpart to the openness below.
Between family members working in the garden and those in the living room, exchanges of sightlines arise across a slight difference in height.
We often design relationships and distances within interiors through split-level floors. Here, that approach extends outward to the relationship between architecture and garden.
Aldo van Eyck called the realm where enclosure and openness are experienced at once within a single space the "in-between."
In this house, it is the roof that takes on this role. Seen from inside, it is a ceiling; seen from the garden, an extension of the ground.
The house is clad in charred cedar (yakisugi) beneath a corrugated galvanized steel roof, and the interiors combine lauan plywood with trowel-finished mortar floors;
the grass roof is watered automatically from the site's existing well. We hope this rear garden—richer now than before the house was built—will become a gathering place for the new family.
