A small house that maximizes family time | Tetsuo Kondo Architects

While the outside of this small house looks like a jumbled stack of boxes, the inside is anything but boxy. Rather than having closed off rooms, Tetsuo Kondo Architects designed it to be as open as possible. The owners are a family with two young kids. Because both parents work, they wanted to spend as much time as possible together as a family when at home.

The core of the 89.6 m² (964 ft²) house is a combination living room and stair hall. Except for the bathrooms, every other room is open to that central space. From the living room it is possible to see into the kitchen and dining room, the master bedroom a couple of steps down and the two loft-like children’s rooms above. That would be too much openness for most people, and even this family might want more privacy when the kids get older. Fortunately the layout of the floor plan should make it easy enough to add more privacy with sliding screens, half walls or full walls.

The boxes are staggered horizontally, leaving small outdoor spaces between them. The ground-level gaps became glass-walled courtyard gardens and the ones above are rooftop terraces over the boxes below. These outdoor spaces are small but they allow almost all the main rooms to have windows on four sides, bringing abundant light into the small house.

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Photographs by Iwan Baan and Ken’ichi Suzuki, courtesy of Tetsuo Kondo Architects. Via Archello.

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