A Kyoto Home Built Around a Cat, a Tree, and a Lantern of Light
A couple in Kyoto wanted a new home on the site of a childhood house. They also wanted their cat to have the run of at least part of it. Tato Architects, a studio based in the city, delivered both — and squeezed daylight into every corner of a tight, overlooked plot at the end of a small alley.
The project, called House in Shichiku, sits where the client grew up. Tato Architects founder Yo Shimada said the studio wanted to keep as much of the existing garden as possible, including a mature tree already on site. Rather than build square to the plot, the studio rotated the entire gabled form in plan — a slight twist that created four wedge-shaped gardens at the building's edges, giving each room a strip of outdoor space. (Dezeen)
The exterior is deliberately plain: a simple gabled shape clad in sheets of corrugated metal on the upper level, with full-height windows wrapping the ground floor to look out onto those angular gardens. The grey plasterwork below gives way to a different finish above, marking the split between the two levels.
Inside, the rotation produces an angular kitchen, living space and study arranged around a central dining area. The interior walls, aligned to the surrounding street grid rather than the rotated footprint, create a plan that folds inward. At the centre, a void shaped like a miniature of the site outline was carved through the ceiling — a vertical cut that gives release to what is otherwise a low, continuous ground-floor space.
The ceilings down here sit just over two metres high, finished with a subtly reflective silver paint that bounces what little light arrives deep into the plan. Above the dining table, a rectilinear cut-out is topped by a raised table on the upper floor, forming a lantern-like opening that channels daylight through the home. Skylights and an internal light well do the rest of the work.
Upstairs, the bedrooms are organised around a central hall. The dividing walls stop short of the high, white-painted gable ceilings, so light from the skylights can travel over the partitions and reach rooms that would otherwise be dark.
And the cat? The staircase between the two floors can be closed off with a wooden door, letting the owners decide how far their cat can roam. A small detail, but the kind that shapes the daily life of the building as much as any light well or wedge garden.
Tato Architects has form with inventive domestic plans. The studio's earlier House in Takatsuki, completed in 2020, arranged its living spaces across sixteen gradually stepped floor levels — a continuous landscape inside a single house. House in Shichiku, by contrast, works its tricks in section: silver paint, a lantern cut-out, and a central void that pulls the eye upward in a home where the ceilings almost touch your head. (Designboom, Dezeen)
