In my experience, this is the most commonly requested layout for a home, with a living/dining/kitchen area, Japanese-style room, and bathroom on the first floor, and a children's room, bedroom, and closet on the second floor.

I think this is probably one of the most common requests for two-story homes among the general public, and the theme of this article was how to respond to this universal request.

The site is in a residential area with a rural landscape to the south, and two roads to the south and east, and a promenade to the north. The client chose this site because of the good views, openness, and spaciousness. When building a house on a plot surrounded by houses, you always consider the volume and window position while keeping in mind the surrounding houses, but this time the large roof shape was not only for that reason, but also somehow seems to overlap with the prototype of a camping tent, which is the client's hobby.

The tent is basically a single room with no partitions. With this house, we also had to think about how to arrange the space on the second floor at a comfortable distance from the first floor without being separated from it. By making the corridor on the second floor a study space that is connected to the first floor through an atrium, a sense of unity was created, and by raising the children's room slightly, the study space became like a bridge, connecting the first and second floors in stages. At the same time, the first floor has a horizontal line of sight that stretches north and south, while the second floor has a diagonal upward line of sight, making use of the windows in such a way that the view is different even in the same direction.

The exterior is a little open. On the south side across the road there are often wheat fields or rice paddies, and the house is a place where you can spend time looking at those fields, but this road is a route that many elementary school students take to school. In the garden that stretches out to the rice paddies, a dry river called the road flows, and I thought it was interesting that it would be shaped like this if you just imagined that there were killifish called elementary school students swimming in it.

I always aim to create something that is simply ordinary, but I always feel that it is really difficult to come up with an ordinary floor plan. At the same time, this house made me realize that this is exactly why there is so much fun in pursuing it.