MIDW Nestles a Timber-Braced House into a Wild Slope in Tamba

Some sites arrive already designed. In Tamba, a small mountain town in Kyoto Prefecture, a residential lot sits against an exposed slope that was carved out decades ago during land development. Nature reclaimed it: wild grasses, scrubby trees, a modest ecosystem that now reads less like leftover terrain and more like an intentional garden. MIDW, the Kyoto-based practice led by Daisuke Hattori and Saori Hattori, took that existing condition seriously. Rather than bulldoze the slope or turn the house away from it, they oriented the entire building to embrace a triangular garden wedged between structure and hillside.

What makes this project genuinely interesting is how its structural logic becomes its visual identity. A repeating pattern of diagonal timber bracing fills the clerestory band that wraps the upper volume, giving the house a graphic rhythm that is visible both from inside and out. At dusk the effect is striking: the braces read as a continuous lattice of shadow and warm light, turning a utilitarian corrugated metal box into something closer to a lantern. It is a house that treats its bones as its best feature.

Ground and Garden

The building sits on a linear footprint oriented along the slope, its long glazed wall facing directly into the meadow grasses that colonize the hillside. Concrete blocks lift a timber deck off the ground at one end, acknowledging the changing grade without fighting it. The corrugated metal cladding is deliberately plain, a material choice that lets the house recede against the rural landscape rather than compete with it.

From the street, the residence reads as a modest volume tucked beneath the wooded hillside. Only the illuminated clerestory band hints at what is happening inside. The architects seem to have understood that in a small town like this, the right gesture is a quiet one: a building that belongs to its setting rather than announcing itself.

The Diagonal Brace as Motif

The diagonal bracing is the project's signature move, and MIDW commits to it fully. At the clerestory level, repeated X-shaped timber members fill the glazed band, creating a pattern that is simultaneously structural and decorative. Seen from outside at twilight, the braces cast a rhythmic silhouette against the warm interior glow. Seen from inside, they frame fragments of sky and treetop in triangular apertures that shift as you move through the house.

The approach recalls a long tradition in Japanese carpentry where exposed structure carries aesthetic weight, but the execution here is distinctly contemporary. The bracing is graphic, almost industrial, more reminiscent of warehouse trusses than temple joinery. That tension between the rural setting and the slightly tough structural language gives the house its character.

Living Along the Slope

Inside, the plan unfolds as a linear sequence of domestic spaces arranged along the long axis. A freestanding wood stove anchors the living area, with horizontal ribbon windows at seated eye level framing the hillside vegetation as a continuous green band. The kitchen and dining zone sits under a concrete ceiling, with timber cabinetry running along one wall and the diagonal clerestory overhead flooding the room with diffuse light.

The material palette is restrained: concrete ceilings, timber floors, pale green walls in the corridors. Nothing competes for attention. The effect is calm without being precious, and the diagonal bracing overhead adds just enough visual energy to keep the spaces from feeling flat.

Retreating Into the Frame

The private rooms push the relationship with landscape even further. A bedroom features full-height glazing that opens directly onto the meadow grasses, dissolving the boundary between interior and slope. A library lines one wall with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves while the diagonal braced glazing above introduces a controlled slice of daylight. These are rooms that reward stillness.

A corridor with exposed diagonal bracing overhead and those pale green walls connects the more public and private zones. The color choice is subtle but deliberate: the green picks up on the wild vegetation outside, pulling the landscape into the circulation spine without resorting to more glass. It is one of those small decisions that reveals how carefully the architects thought about the experience of moving through the house.

Plans and Drawings

The site plan confirms the strategy: the house occupies a narrow rectangular footprint between a residential block and the curved topographic lines of the overgrown slope. Trees scatter across the triangular garden that forms in the gap. The floor plan reveals a single-loaded arrangement, with all primary rooms facing the hillside. And the section drawing makes the structural concept legible: a single-story volume with an exposed frame rising above the wall line to form the braced clerestory band.

What the drawings clarify is how tightly the building's form follows from the site constraints. The linear plan is not an arbitrary choice but a direct response to the lot geometry and the desire to maximize contact with the slope. Every room gets the garden. Nothing is wasted on a back-of-house condition.

Why This Project Matters

House in Tamba is a reminder that the most compelling residential projects often start not with a formal idea but with a reading of what is already there. MIDW found something worth keeping in an overgrown slope that most developers would have graded flat, and they organized the entire house around it. The result is a dwelling that feels rooted in its place without resorting to nostalgia or regionalist cliché.

The diagonal bracing deserves particular attention because it solves multiple problems at once: it provides lateral stability, it creates a distinctive visual identity, and it filters light into the clerestory in a way that changes throughout the day. That kind of economy, where one move does the work of three, is what separates a good house from a merely competent one. In a small mountain town in Kyoto Prefecture, MIDW built something worth the trip.

House in Tamba, designed by MIDW (Daisuke Hattori + Saori Hattori), Kyoto, Japan, completed 2025. Photography by Kei Sugino and Takuro Ogawa.

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