Masahiro Katsume and Mette Fredskild Build Eight Japandi Summer Houses on a Lithuanian Lake

In the forests of Dzūkija, Lithuania, eight identical gabled houses sit quietly along the shore of Glūkas lake. They are dark, sharp, and deliberately modest, each one 75 square meters plus a terrace that opens toward the water and the tree line. Konga Village is a residential project that takes the concept of a summer colony and strips it down to its essentials: shared ground, individual shelter, and the landscape in between.

What makes this project worth studying is the unlikely collaboration behind it. Japanese architect Masahiro Katsume designed the spatial organization and architectural form, while Danish architect Mette Fredskild, whose decade of working in Japan left a visible mark on her sensibility, handled the interiors. The result is a legible hybrid: Japandi not as a branding exercise, but as an actual negotiation between two design cultures playing out across 10,000 square meters of lakefront forest.

Dark Volumes in a Light Forest

The houses present themselves as dark corrugated metal forms, their pitched roofs and blackened materiality giving them the character of refined agricultural buildings rather than vacation homes. Standing seam roofing meets blackened brick chimneys, a combination that reads as both industrial and domestic. The decision to clad every house identically is not a cost-saving shortcut; it is the architectural expression of Katsume's stated commitment to democratic design. No unit is more prominent than another. The village hierarchy is flat.

Against the backdrop of evergreens and wildflower gardens, the dark volumes recede rather than compete. The buildings absorb light instead of reflecting it, which has the counterintuitive effect of making the surrounding greenery feel more vivid. It is a landscape strategy disguised as a material choice.

The Interior as a Single Warm Room

Step inside and the palette flips entirely. Where the exterior is black metal, the interior is oak and plywood, warm-toned and tactile. Fredskild's interiors treat each 75-square-meter house as essentially one room, organized by furniture rather than walls. Open shelving defines the kitchen zone, tall storage cabinets structure the edges, and a vaulted white ceiling ties everything together overhead. The sloped ceilings follow the roofline faithfully, which gives even the smallest nook a sense of vertical generosity.

The living area is deliberately casual: a grey sofa, a black armchair, a wood stove, a cowhide rug on polished concrete. Nothing here is precious. The Japandi label applies because the space genuinely embodies both traditions: Japanese spatial fluidity, where one zone flows into the next without hard boundaries, and Scandinavian functionalism, where every object earns its place. There is no excess, but there is also no austerity. The rooms feel lived in rather than curated.

Threshold Moments

Some of the most considered moves happen in the transitional spaces. A plywood-clad entry nook with an integrated bench, set beneath the pitched ceiling and softened by sheer curtains, operates as an airlock between outside and inside. It is a compression point: low, warm, contained. A narrow corridor lined with oak cabinetry and white walls leads to a stool bathed in natural light at its end, turning circulation into a sequence rather than a corridor.

These threshold conditions are where Katsume's Japanese spatial thinking is most legible. In traditional Japanese residential design, the transition from public to private is choreographed through a series of intermediate zones. Here, the same principle plays out with Scandinavian materials and a pitched-roof vernacular. It is cultural translation at the scale of a doorway.

Framing the Lake

Floor-to-ceiling glazing wraps the lake-facing side of each house, and the architects pair it with sheer curtains that filter light without blocking views. The effect is of a scrim between domestic life and the landscape: lawn, reeds, then water. The terrace extends the living space outward, but the glazing wall is the real design move. It turns the lake into a permanent fixture of the interior, a backdrop that shifts with weather and season.

Crucially, the houses do not compete for the best view. Because all eight are identical in plan and orientation, the relationship between building and lake is consistent across the village. This reinforces the communal ethos: shared boats, a floating sauna, a collective fireplace area, and children's play zones occupy the common ground between the houses and the water. The private realm is the house. Everything between the front door and the shoreline belongs to the group.

Why This Project Matters

Konga Village matters because it takes two overused concepts, Japandi aesthetics and community-driven living, and delivers both with genuine rigor. The collaboration between Katsume and Fredskild is not decorative fusion. It is a design argument: that Japanese spatial principles and Scandinavian material honesty share enough DNA to produce architecture that belongs to both traditions and neither. The result feels specific to its Lithuanian lakefront site in a way that purely Scandinavian or purely Japanese designs would not.

More importantly, the project offers a credible model for collective leisure. Eight identical houses, none elevated above the others, organized around shared infrastructure rather than private amenity. It is a quiet rebuke to the trophy cabin. In a market flooded with bespoke retreats designed for Instagram, Konga Village suggests that the more interesting architectural question is not what your house looks like, but what happens in the space between your house and your neighbor's.

Konga Village, designed by Masahiro Katsume (architecture) and Mette Fredskild (interiors). Dzūkija, Lithuania. 10,000 m² site; eight houses of 75 m² each. Completed 2024. Photography by Dovalde Butenaite.

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