It is a renovation project of a residence situated within a lush garden on the outskirts of Kyoto. The premises’ comfortable environment—created through the interplay of the house, outside walls, vegetable gardens, trees, and flowers—informed the direction of our design to “make the most of what already exists.”

The seemingly plain shape of the gable-roofed main building symbolized shared memories for the client family, who has lived here across generations. This determined our scheme to retain the gable-roof form while undertaking a comprehensive renewal of the house.

Prior to the project, a single-story RC extension had already been added to the main building. Our design repeats the spatial composition of this single-story volume and applies it to the main house renovation, thus extending the spatial sequence, the rhythm, experienced in the existing one-story building throughout the house.

This dialogic approach of transforming existing elements within a new context was inspired by Matsuo Basho’s haikai renku, a collaborative creation of a poem in which multiple people each compose a verse following the preceding verse.