Unique Homes in Japan: Width of House is Length of Small Car

In Japan, homeowners and architects are often confronted with the issue of building on small and irregularly shaped plots of land. In Tokyo’s Setagaya ward lies a house whose maximum width is 2.0 meters (about 6.6 feet), or less than the length of a small Japanese passenger car.

Indeed, Japanese are often pros are shoehorning their cars into parking spaces, but in this case, the homeowners and the architects, Atelier Tekuto, had to shoehorn their home into a seemingly impossible site area: a long, narrow trapezoid with a frontage of 3.26m (about 10.7 feet) narrowing to 0.79m (2.6 feet). The depth (length of the trapezoid) from the street is 29.3m (96 feet). Local building ordinances also required a 0.5 set-back of the external walls from the adjacent land, so at most, the width of the house itself could not be more than 2m.

According to the architects, Atelier Tekuto, the owners of this unique home are a young couple who wanted to buy a piece of land and build their own home on a limited budget. What they could afford was this narrow and long parcel, so the architects designed the house on these concepts:

• Take advantage of the extremely long space. Most of the living space was put in the basement level because the basement floor area is not counted as part of the maximum allowable floor-area-ratio (FAR).
• Keep the exterior skin as thin as possible to maximize the usable space. The exterior walls are made of fiber-reinforced plastic panels, and the floors are made of expanded metal mesh. These translucent materials also have the advantage of bringing in soft natural light. Also, instead of using conventional techniques for the retaining walls, the architects used steel plates with anti-corrosive, heat-insulation and waterproof treatments, which added an extra 0.5 meters to the available width, compared to using concrete.

The resulting design resembles the shape of a canoe that is three-stories high. The living room, kitchen and bath are in the basement; most of the first floor does not contain living space, just the genkan (the foyer where you take off your shoes); and the bedroom is upstairs, for a total of sixty square meters (646 square feet) of living space. There’s just enough room to park the family car in front.

The house is named “Lucky Drops,” which comes from the English translation of a Japanese proverb meaning, “Save the best for last.” The homeowners may have bought a remnant piece of land but did not waste any space in building their cool, urban home.