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Architects: y+M design office
Text description provided by the architects. The Sumikiri House is located within a residential neighborhood where there are existing older tenement houses in Amagasaki-City, Hyogo-Pref, Japan. The existing fabric of the neighborhood consists of narrow roadways, about 4 meters, and dense housing with limited poor views. The house is located on a corner lot, and with the idea to maximize the lot the architects created a design that incorporated a lot of natural light and joyfulness for the family.
In the Sumikiri House the plan at ground level has its corner removed, appropriate to its name which means corner cutoff in Japanese, creating a garage space and a more open feel to the narrow lot.
A plain-woven iron grating on the façade of the house suspends out of the the missing corner and creates an interesting mix of transparency and privacy. Although the grating works as a partition, it provide a brightness and a perspective with inside the room where is not large.
Sumikiri House achieves a moderate distance and relation between the client and their neighbors. The design of the corner cutoff and plain-woven grating achieves both transparency of perspective visibility and secured privacy in addition efficiently utilizing the narrow lot.