This project concerns the renovation of a century-old Kyo-machiya located in Shimogyo Ward, Kyoto. The goal was to transform the traditional townhouse into a lodging facility for travelers.
Over Kyoto’s 1,200-year history, the jōbō grid system—introduced from Tang dynasty Chang’an—has shaped its urban fabric since the founding of Heian-kyō. By the Edo period, the “shop-front, residence-rear” machiya had become the normative urban housing type. Fire regulations and property taxes based on street frontage helped maintain the characteristically narrow façades of these homes, often likened to “eel’s beds” (unagi no nedoko) for their long, slender proportions.
A typical Kyo-machiya is defined by this front-to-back spatial sequence. Street-facing units are usually divided lengthwise into a doma (earthen-floored passage) and a raised timber-floored zone. The doma, often paved in packed earth or stone, runs from the entrance toward the interior and commonly contains the kitchen stove beneath a hibukuro, or smoke chimney. The raised zone is divided laterally into sequential rooms: shop (mise), family kitchen (daidoko), and rear tatami rooms (oku-no-ma), separated by sliding partitions. This layout reveals a transition from public to private, embedded in both form and function.
The house we renovated consists of two separate two-story volumes connected by a corridor. The original façade and mise space had been removed; the doma and hibukuro were disrupted by a raised kitchen platform; and a ceiling had been installed where the vertical void once stood. The house’s original spatial order had been replaced by a fragmented, compressed, and incoherent composition.
Our design approach unfolded in two phases: first, to reconstruct a spatial layout appropriate to the typology in order to extract its structural logic; and second, to accommodate modern programmatic needs within that reestablished framework. The key interventions included:
1. Using interior columns as reference, we pulled back the current facade to its presumed original position, reestablishing the mise boundary and creating a front garden between house and street;
2. We removed the raised platform occupying the doma, restoring a continuous longitudinal flow from entrance inward;
3. The mise and daidoko were combined into an open-plan living space, with adjusted floor heights;
4. Some of the essential elements—kitchen stove, dining table, air conditioning—were consolidated into a core “device” composed of fixed furniture, wall planes, and a suspended ceiling. Relocated from the perimeter to the threshold between doma and living area, this intervention created a spatial transition articulated through three distinct horizontal planes;
5. The hibukuro was restored as a source of light and ventilation, with all wiring, ducts, and exhaust lines routed visibly through this vertical shaft.
Throughout the renovation, we established spatial relationships—both parallel and contrasting—to connect nature and artifice, past and present. We hoped that the permeability of space would offer guests subtle moments of temporal resonance, revealing the cultural landscape of Kyoto through lived experience.
To accommodate a range of guest preferences, we designed four room types: traditional Japanese (washitsu), modern washitsu, Western-style, and suite. The washitsu rooms allow for flexible bedding arrangements on tatami, while Western rooms and suites feature standard beds and furnishings.
This project reaffirmed for us the value of typological study in guiding architectural design. As Aldo Rossi once stated:
“The study of the city must be concerned not only with its physical form and its development, but also with the values that this form expresses.”
