Garden House | mA-style Architects

Garden House designed by mA-style architects, Sometimes architecture isn’t just about the interior space, but the exterior as well, like Garden House where the landscape around the structure became the driving force for it. The area around this house provided the architect with inspiration, believing the garden was too beautiful to build on, providing a view that made him forget it was located in a residential area. This mindset led to finding a harmony between garden and house by removing the border separating the two.

The house itself doesn’t fit the traditional appearance of what we’d normally associate with a residential building. Instead, it is made up of several boxes of different functions connected by a thin flat roof allowing for everything to be located on a single level. The area separating the boxes becomes a borderless space, flowing from inside to outside and back again through the structure. To help achieve this openness a wooden frame sliding door of glass was adapted to the structure, so even when it was closed a constant view of the garden remains.

The plain structure not only pays respect to the neighboring buildings made of old and heavy undressed concrete but also gives the house the sense of ambiguity. The house isn’t static; it’s designed to constantly change depending upon the daily behavior and feeling of the residents, just like the garden is affected by the four seasons. There’s nothing flashy about this building that is firmly rooted on the site. The lack of fittings and other details only aid in preserving the relationship explored between inside and outside. The house isn’t striving to stand out and overwhelm the space, instead, it becomes exactly what mA-style Architects wanted it to be, a house or garden.

Project Info:
Architects: mA-style architects
Location: Hamamatsu, Japan
Design Team: Atsushi Kawamoto, Mayumi Kawamoto
Area: 91.09 sqm
Project Year: 2011
Photographs: Kai Nakamura
Project Name: Garden House