To the Miniature Manor Born

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The New York Sun

Finding your studio apartment a bit cramped? Try living in a wooden barrel formerly used for making soy sauce and measuring 6.5 feet in diameter. This is what one group of friends in Japan used to create a shared weekend house, which they equipped with a central hearth for cooking and heating, air-conditioning for the summer, a hi-fi system, and a television (flat-screen, of course). The house cost about $4,600 to build and “can seat seven people in close comfort.”


This soy-barrel house is one of many homes featured in “Space: Japanese Design Solutions for Compact Living,” by Michael Freeman (Rizzoli/Universe, $29.95).The book, itself measuring a compact 7-by-7 inches, details some of the ingenious techniques that Japanese architects have devised for making small quarters – which are prevalent in Japan – feel not only livable, but even desirable. These lessons are particularly valuable for residents of New York City, where space is always at a premium and square-footage is the main determinant of any apartment’s value cachet.


According to Mr. Freeman, there is a long and significant history in Japan of building and living in small spaces. Traditionally, a Japanese home consisted of one room, separated into various living spaces by a combination of shoji (translucent sliding screens) and fusuma (opaque sliding screens). The measuring unit used for determining the dimensions of rooms was the densely-woven straw tatami mat (measuring approximately 2 feet 11 inches by 5 feet 11 inches – large enough to accommodate one person lying down) that once adorned the floors of all Japanese homes and could be used for standing, sitting, or lying on. The traditional chashitsu, or tea-ceremony room, originally consisted of 4 1 /2 tatami mats, but has often been designed with smaller dimensions, with the idea that small spaces promote wabi, or calm simplicity. The entrance to a chashitsu is typically no higher than 3 feet, so that entrants have to bend and stoop, showing humility.


Tatami mats and tea-ceremony rooms are no longer found in all Japanese homes, but contemporary architects have used their essential elements of human-scale living, basic functionality, and simplicity in creating modern homes in tiny spaces. One example of this it the “Nine-Tsubo House” project, a series of houses based on a floor plan of 322 square feet, or nine tsubos (a tsubo is a square formed by placing two tatami mats side by side). This design, first conceived by architect Makoto Masuzawa in 1952 as “a house that anyone can have built anywhere,” has been revived in recent years by several Japanese architects, with surprisingly appealing results. The first owner to move into a Nine-Tsubo house remarked, “I just felt like living in this house, even though it would be smaller than the apartment I rented at the time.”


Some of the homes featured in “Space” were designed to make the best of the tiny, awkwardly shaped, and seemingly useless plots of land that are prevalent between buildings in Tokyo and other Japanese cities. Known as unagi-no-nedoko (eel bed), these sites often go unused. Architects have come up with a number of ingenious designs to utilize these spaces. The architect couple Tsutomu Matsuno and Kumi Aizawa acquired one L-shaped plot between two buildings that was not even wide enough to accommodate an automobile. They created a striking, breathtakingly narrow, three-story building in the space containing an art gallery, meeting room, office, bedroom, and even a small garden. Another architect, Toshiaki Ishida, constructed a building that measures 52 1 /2 feet long but only 5 1 /2 feet deep on an “eel bed” plot, also in Tokyo. The top floor houses the kitchen and office at one end, and at the other, down a long narrow corridor, a “relaxation space” consisting of a single armchair – there is literally room for nothing else.


Some Japanese families have deliberately chosen small spaces for their dwellings as a way of fighting the polarizing and isolating forces of contemporary life. One couple with two young sons commissioned a house designed to promote “family closeness.” An unusual feature of this space is the “family bedroom,” a bedroom shared by all the family members in which the floor space is taken up entirely by four futons. Another couple with a similar goal of fostering a communal family life commissioned a house in which the common areas are spacious but the private areas, called “microbedrooms” by the architect, are essentially big enough only for a bed.


If it’s difficult to imagine most Western families embracing “family” or “micro” bedrooms, it’s even harder to conceive of them concealing most of their possessions, as some of the Japanese families featured in the book do, with staircase steps that contain drawers for books, futons stored under the floor, and tatami mats that hinge upward to reveal items stored underneath.


Perhaps most foreign to Westerners is the idea of jettisoning possessions to simplify the living space. One Kyoto couple commissioned a small house that they planned to retire to, and realized that they would not have room for their large, treasured book collection. And so they put all the books into storage, with the exception of one, a favorite book on Matisse, for which the architect created a “bookshelf,” a niche measuring about one-inch wide cut into the wall. The single book, uniquely displayed, would stand in for the entire collection.


The New York Sun

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