Koro House

Katsutoshi Sasaki + Associates’ Koro House wants to be a suggestion for Japan’s new residential area: a house in the middle of a planted garden, without any fence, with a polygonal plan that receive the sunlight from different angles.

The project is located in an anonymous residential area in Toyota – Japan –, that used to be a forest before the intensive urban development.

The corner lot faces two roads. The architects decided to locate the house in the depths of the site and made buffer space between the building and the streets, without using fences, and to plant trees on the whole site. In this way the garden, opened to the street, reminds the former forest, featuring river stones and the wild cherry blossoms that populated the mountain before the urban development.

Thanks to the gentle slope toward south, the house can receive sunlight all day long, a fortunate condition rarely found in this kind of residential areas. The hexagonal plan allows to separate the front garden from the small, private, garden at the rear and to reflect multilaterally the transition of the sun into the rooms. The bedroom and the service rooms (bathrooms and kitchen) are located along the sides of the hexagon, with the family room at the center.

The sunlight coming from the skylight at the centre of the family room is damped by a wooden vertical lattice that reflects, with its shade, the transition of natural light. This delicate transition let inhabitants feel the riches and the flux of time, and stirs their Japanese sensitivities.