Rooms that follow the landscape | ON Design Partners
“Rooms that follow the landscape” consists of a series of room strung in an arc across a small hillside in Japan. Studio ON Design Partners angled each room 15 degrees from the next to create a plan that follows the path of the sun. As the rooms rotate, they also rise and fall with the natural grade of the site.
The main social spaces are all open to each other but they are defined as separate rooms by the changes in floor level, varying ceiling heights, and a mix of different ceiling and floor finishes. The windows, however, were all kept aligned with each other, giving the occupants a continuous view of the scenery. As a result, the height of the window above the floor also varies by room. The window is right at desk height in the study space but drops lower in the living room and is down to the floor level in the “Japanese-style” room, where it is customary to sit on the tatami mat floor.
The one-bedroom home has 95.2 m2 (1,024 ft2) of floor space. Normally we wouldn’t feature a one-bedroom house that large, but this one has a particularly unique design and it could be changed to two bedrooms fairly easily. By relocating the main entrance to the middle of the house, the existing entry and storage room (at the carport end of the house) could become a second bedroom.
Click a thumbnail to view a larger photo, then click on the photo to advance to the next one.
-
- floor plan
-
- entry
-
- entry hall
Photographs by Koichi Torimura, courtesy of ON Design Partners. Via DesignBoom.
Text copyright 2014 SmallHouseBliss. All Rights Reserved.
