Mind the Beginner

I’ve been looking into minimalist homes a lot lately and at how the Japanese tackle this challenge in particular. In my previous article on minimalist living I identified what it is exactly that we need to live somewhere, for convenience I’ll give the list again:

A bed

A desk/table and chair

A toilet

A shower

A kitchen

A place to store our 100 items

I still feel this list is all we need. We could simplify and make the bed a mattress on the floor and the kitchen a gas stove on the table but that would bemore like camping. Nobody said that minimalist living should be hardship right?
The Japanese have gotten this minimalistic living down to an art form. With the congestion of the urban area’s plots to build a home are getting smaller and smaller. They even have a name for it: kyosho jutaku (狭小住宅). If we let babelfish loose on that phrase we end up with the translation “narrow small residential” which does seem fitting. In proper English I’d like to stick with micro home or micro living.

These homes being so small don’t let you live a cluttered life. Anything out of place will become an obstruction somehow.

Now I was in the Ikea last Friday and they’re advertising with a 37 square meter home. To bad they had to stuff it with all kinds of “nifty storage solutions” which made it a tight fit. Storage was everywhere and everything had several functions it seemed. I never thought that in 37 square meters I could still feel like a sardine. You couldn’t swing a cat in there. I bet they never heard of the 100 items challenge.

These Japanese micro homes take living small to a new level. The Ikea apartment was 37 square meters. The plots the Japanese build these houses on are no bigger than 30 square meters. Granted they do get to add a few floors if they want but still. Some of these homes sacrifice a part of the plot to accommodate a parking space for their car as well.
To get an idea of pricing over there. The average-of-the-average Tokyo married couple may be looking to buy a brand-new 70 square meters apartment at a cost of ¥45,000,000 and above. (That’s over $456,000.- dollars). With those prices it’s not strange that micro living is so popular in cities like Tokyo and Kobe.
Although not all the homes in this list will fit in such a plot I found a few examples of minimalist homes that I’d really like to share with you.

The first one is Tadao Ando’s 4×4 house. A concrete tower rising 4 stories above ground and a basement below. It stands 13.4m tall. The “three cubes” that make up this house are roughly 4×4x4 meters in size. The top cube is offset one meter in both of the horizontal axis. Actually on this building the plot was exactly 5×5 meters. The total floor space is 117.19 m2
“Each floor of the house is used for a different activity: storage in the basement, access and service on the ground floor, bedroom on the first floor, study on the second, kitchen and dining room on the top floor. The spaces are almost completely enclosed on three sides, while they are open on the fourth facing towards the sea.”
The amount of light that comes in through the massive windows is staggering and the view is to die for. I can definitely see myself live in this house. More than enough room to store the 100 things. Park the motorcycle under the overhang of the top cube and enjoy sunsets over the sea with a good book and a glass of sake.

On to our second home, this one is bigger than the 30 square meter plot but I think it’s really to nice not to share:
The Garden and Sea House by Takao Shiotsuka
If white is not your color you’re in trouble with this one. Again, this house has a view of the sea. There is a lot of glass here, from floor to ceiling. Combined with a completely white “garden” this house has the feel of a sacred place. The total floor space is 237.14m2. Quite large actually, although it’s not living on a small footprint it definitely is a minimalist home.

The third home in our list is Satoshi Kurosaki’s Slit. A very thin house on a narrow and long plot squeezed in between two other plots. 85 m2 living area if I’m correct. Not much to say about this one. It was designed for a family of three who needed (job) to live in the city but on a tight budget. It’s simply amazing how much can be done with so little room.

I’d like to give you a bonus house toend this post: Ghost by Jin Otagiri. It’s white, it’s minimal, it’s empty. Either you love it or you hate it. No words, just a picture:

Tags: 4x4 House, footprint, Japanese, Jin Otagiri, living, Minimalism, minimalist living, Satoshi Kurosaki, Tadao Ando, Takao Shiotsuka

This entry was posted on Monday, June 22nd, 2009 at 1:26 pm and is filed under Minimalism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.