House in a Plum Grove: Intricate tiny House designed by Kazuyo Sejima

Kazuyo Sejima design philosophy for small house

梅林の家 (House in a plum grove) is Kazuyo Sejima’s iconic “tiny house” design located in a Tokyo suburb. It consists of multiple layers that are intricately interwinded. Where did she get an idea to create so many small rooms in a small house?

In a lecture she gave for the 東西アスファルト事業協同組合 (Tozai Asphalt Jigyo Kyoto Kumiai) in 2004, she recounted her dilemma to design residential houses in Japan: Japanese houses are small by design (because land is scarce and expensive). There is always an imbalance between available space and the amount of stuff people own. If you want to live neatly, you need to give up owning, but it’s not ideal. So she tried to design a house in which families can still own and enjoy what they like, without getting too messy.

If you area music or book fan, how many CDs or books you can keep in your small house
without getting messy?
(A picture of a room in the House in a Plum Grove.) 

Creatinig many small rooms was her answer.

But why?

Design of House in a Plum Grove

First, the place only had 90m2 plus for a family of five. There were beautiful plum trees on the property which the family wanted to keep, so the area available for a building was even smaller.

If you want to maximize limited space, you might as well try to make a living room as large as you can, and add a couple of small individual rooms. But if you do that, it’s very likely that everyone ends up leaving his/her stuff in the living room, making it a messy, disorganized place.

Sejima’s solution was to create as many “semi-public” spaces as possible. Instead of creating designated living/dining room, Dad’s room/kids’ rooms etc., she connected semi-open rooms with steel plates with random openings.    

When you are in one of the rooms, you can still see outside or part of other rooms through the openings. (It sounds like almost all the rooms have windows.)  

For example, one side of kid’s room on the second floor is connected to the bedroom high ceilings on the ground floor, and the other side is connected to another bedroom on the second floor beyond which you can see the high ceilings of the living room on the first floor. 

Even though each room is a separate room, they maintain connectivity with other rooms.

Also, because each room is small and lacks depth, adjacent rooms you can see through openings look like pictures hanging on walls. Steel plates really function to connect rooms. 

A fun fact: the House has a garden on the roof. They re-used excavated soil to grow lawn. It is a small house, but full of ideas and passion to enjoy life. 

If a family prefers to stay connected even when they are in private rooms, a house like this could provide a new way of living. It’s a bit like MUJI house and Sou Fujimoto’s House NA