This house was designed for a couple and their two young children.
Rather than a fully developed family made up of independent individuals, they are in the formative years of becoming a collective unit. We felt it was important to create an environment that would support and embrace the process of children gaining independence while the family grows closer as a whole.

The site is located in a residential area of Gifu City. It is a rectangular plot measuring 8.6 meters wide by 22 meters deep, facing a road to the north. Due to a history of flooding in the area, the floor level was raised approximately one meter above ground.

The building consists of a large, stage-like central space that opens toward the garden, two long and narrow volumes on either side, and an external corridor on the east side. The western volume contains storage and a staircase and functions as a kind of double-skin façade that helps mitigate the thermal impact of the afternoon sun. The eastern volume houses the bathroom and a second-floor loft. The boundary between Space A and the dressing room/toilet is a shared storage space accessible from both sides.

The loft can be used as a study or library—a quiet, enclosed area contrasting with the openness of the main space. The central, white-painted, stage-like area includes Spaces A and B, and a Japanese-style room floating above on the second floor. This space features a large opening facing the southern garden and is bathed in light from deep-set openings on the east and west, as well as from three high-side windows that provide soft overhead light.

The first floor is an L-shaped, open-plan room that can be divided into two spaces using a movable partition. Rather than creating a straight, linear flow, we intentionally shaped the space with slight bulges to create subtle blind spots—allowing people to gently choose their preferred proximity to others.

The external corridor functions as a service path, providing direct access to the bathroom and kitchen from the entrance.

In this house, individuals do not have fixed, exclusive territories. The movable partition and the three-dimensional layering—including the Japanese-style room—allow residents to choose spaces that suit their activities in the moment. Storage is not treated as static stock space, but rather as a set of accessible “pockets” from which things can be taken and returned as needed.

People move between the east and west “pockets” in zigzagging paths, like billiard balls bouncing around a table. By placing small rooms and niches adjacent to the expansive central space, we aimed to create an environment that allows various activities to exist simultaneously, in a fluid and harmonious way.