A curved timber quantity sits on the coronary heart of Sugi Home, shaping the rooms round it with out closing them off. Designed by Ujizono Architects, the household residence occupies an 83.91-square-meter website in Kyoto, beside the southern method to Yoshida Shrine. Accomplished in January 2026, the timber-framed home accommodates 94.87 sq. meters of flooring area, with its most attention-grabbing choices unfolding inside a restrained exterior.
From the road, the higher story reads as a wood field suspended above a recessed entrance and parking area. Vertical boards give the facade a advantageous grain, interrupted by a single outstanding rectangular window. A raised strip of glazing peeks above the entrance roofline. The composition sits between neighboring homes with out attempting to outshout them; its depth comes from the shadow beneath the projecting higher flooring.
Designer: Ujizono Architects
Inside, architects Kazuki Ujigawa and Mirai Ozono set up a distinction between ranges. The bottom flooring follows a comparatively enclosed association, with a hallway connecting three bedrooms and a rest room. A staircase towards the rear leads upstairs, the place dwelling, cooking, and eating share a extra expansive quantity beneath the pitched ceiling. The climb makes the shift from non-public rooms to communal area a part of the on a regular basis route by way of the home.
That higher flooring avoids the clean openness of an undivided room. Its curved timber core partially separates the dwelling space from the decrease kitchen and eating zone, whereas concealing a ladder-like stair to a mezzanine. Transferring across the curve modifications what’s seen and what disappears behind it. A lowered ceiling above the kitchen reinforces the excellence, giving totally different actions their very own proportions with out enclosing every one behind a door.
Daylight supplies one other solution to open the inside whereas sustaining distance from neighboring properties. In line with the architects’ venture description, high-level home windows admit gentle deeper into the home whereas limiting direct overlooking. Uncovered timber rafters stay seen beneath the roof, giving that overhead area a legible construction. The design’s sense of openness depends on top and illumination somewhat than intensive outward-facing glass.
Elsewhere, openings between flooring create visible connections, whereas curtains supply boundaries that residents can modify. These components help the architects’ intention for relations to stay conscious of each other whereas occupying separate areas. Privateness turns into one thing that may range with the exercise, somewhat than a situation decided fully by fastened partitions.
The curved core is the persuasive transfer right here. It offers the shared flooring a middle, makes circulation purposeful, and provides partial separation with out requiring a hall. For a compact household house, that could be a helpful center floor: sufficient definition to differentiate actions, with room for day by day life to overlap.
