Pleats

Abstract

Located near the Japan Sea coast in northern Kyoto Prefecture, Pleats occupies a rural setting with light, air, and views available on all sides. Without immediate neighbors, the house is able to expand toward adjacent gardens and distant landscapes. Planned around an irori (a traditional indoor cooking hearth set into the floor), the house was conceived as an asymmetrical set of nested boxes: a shared space in the middle, storage and circulation in the intermediate layer, and individual rooms on the periphery. Horizontal light shafts cutting diagonally across the centripetal plan bring natural light to the core and link the center to the periphery. Traditional Japanese houses are organized in a sequence of increasing privacy and intimacy as one moves deeper into them (the principle of oku). Pleats inverts that relationship: the entry is a “tunnel” leading directly into the shared space at the heart of the house from which one moves outward to the personal areas. The private rooms are interposed between the exterior gardens and the daily living space. Spatially and formally, Pleats is like a plant inundated with sun and nutrients.