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Photographs:Hiroyuki Hirai
Text description provided by the architects. The project site, only about 46 square meters, is in a high-density residential area of Tokyo. Before, there was a detached house on this site. In Tokyo, this size of house is not rare, and is normally called "Small house". This type of house was the dream for a nuclear household.
Recently, the nuclear household is decreasing, while a one-person household is increasing in Japan. We have taken the old nuclear household dream and adjusted it to today's one-person's household reality. We built a small apartment on this site. Basement floor, loft, and the first floor are the owner's house. She lives alone there, and she rents the second floor for one person.
The owner requested a living room, dining room, kitchen, bedroom, guest room, terrace, garage, bath, toilet, storage and rented room. First, we felt that we couldn't fit all these rooms in this small building. In these cases, we usually follow a standard procedure, reducing the number of rooms by making one multi purpose room.
This time, we tried another approach, because we heard the following opinion from the owner "I want my home to be cozy." We reduced the size of each room so we could fit them all in the house creating a comfortable and cozy living space.
