This is the first property that we have received an order for since opening our office.

The site is a southeast corner lot, but the road to the south faces a shopping street, so although it is not wide, there is a lot of foot traffic to nearby stores and a lot of vehicular traffic. We thought that the straightforward answer would be to propose a courtyard-style house (courthouse) that is somewhat closed off from the outside environment while opening up the inside, but the client does not like a closed environment and would like the openings to be large if possible. After several interviews, it gradually became clear that the keywords for the interior to be "spacious" and "large" were high priorities for the client, and since the client wanted to spend time in a large, sunny space on the second floor, which was directly linked to the purpose of building the house, we shifted to a relatively straightforward plan for a two-story house.

As a result, the plan was structured with two distinctive features.

①Ensuring circulation by varying the angle of the interior space.

②There are no partition walls around the outer perimeter of the main second floor layout, and the ceiling is ensured to reach the full height of the roof.

By ensuring circulation, people can unconsciously understand that there is no dead end ahead, and by not placing walls on the perimeter and leaving the ceiling open, the outermost perimeter of the second floor space can be experienced in its purest state. I believe that these two effects allowed us to secure a large space despite the plan being restricted in height by law (the second floor is about 2250mm from the floor to the bottom of the beams).

Other small touches include a louver system that doubles as a window handrail to limit views from the road, and louvers on the ceiling to create air flow while softly filtering in sunlight.

Generally, the sense of spaciousness seems to be proportional to the floor area, but this is a house that actually takes into account the relationship between the field of vision and walls, as well as the optical illusion effects in the brain, to create a sense of spaciousness.