The residence is a retreat for a client who has a home in Tokyo. For this reason, it was designed as a place for spending time in tranquility, detached from everyday life.

Jewelry is a luxury because it can be nothing but jewelry. A Buddhist altar room in a Japanese home acquires an air of dignity because it has no function directly related to living. In our daily life, we are bound by everyday activities. But when freed from such restraints, in the “out-of-the-ordinary” space, rich moments of life emerge.

While the sea and the earth where life was first born are filled with the color blue, the world looks bluish to the eyes of the dying, as Kenji Miyazawa wrote in his last poem, “Speaking with the eyes.” We expanded on the client’s image of “blue” and used the color as a highlight to express with architecture the cycle of life where one is “born from blue and returns to blue.”