1110 Office Weaves a Traditional Japanese House into the Terraced Rice Fields of Chihaya Akasaka

Chihaya Akasaka is one of those rare Japanese villages where the landscape itself is the architecture. Recognized among Japan's Top 100 Terraced Rice Paddies, the settlement climbs steep hillsides in stacked bands of green and gold, each terrace a piece of infrastructure that has shaped daily life for centuries. The house that 1110 Office was asked to renovate sat squarely in this context, yet it had almost nothing to say about it. Surrounded by warehouses and shuttered behind opaque walls, the original timber dwelling treated one of the country's most distinctive landscapes as scenery that happened to be nearby.

The renovation reverses that relationship completely. By demolishing the warehouses, stripping the ground floor back to a minimal post-and-beam skeleton, and extending the logic of the terraces into the house and its gardens, 1110 Office turned a building that ignored its site into one that is essentially organized by it. The result is a home for a young family that reads less like an interior and more like a sheltered interval between rice paddies, cactus garden, and mountain sky.

A Village Where Topography Is Everything

From above, the project's logic is immediate. The house occupies a narrow shelf between a curving road and a cascade of rice paddies that drop toward a valley town. The terraces are not decorative; they are the organizing geometry of the entire settlement, and every building either works with them or fights them. The original house, hemmed in by storage structures, had effectively walled itself off from this system. Clearing those outbuildings was the first and arguably most consequential design decision: it gave the house a horizon again.

Photogrammetric surveys of the site allowed the architects to map the terrace lines precisely and then extend them into the plot, generating the footprint of new gardens and defining the split levels that organize the interior. The architecture does not mimic the paddies; it borrows their datum lines and turns them into thresholds.

Opening the Ground Floor to the Landscape

The ground floor is where the renovation is most radical. Walls have been replaced by full-height glazing, and the timber structure has been pared to the minimum number of posts and beams needed to hold the traditional tile roof in place. The effect is startling: you stand inside a house and see rice paddies on three sides, with only slender timber columns interrupting the view. The polished concrete floor, cast in a broad curve, slopes gently toward the garden, blurring the distinction between interior slab and exterior terrace.

A double-height sunroom at the entrance acts as a decompression chamber between village road and living space. It is bright, vertical, and filled with hanging plants, setting up a rhythm of compression and release that continues as you move deeper into the house. The open plan means a child can run from kitchen counter to garden without encountering a single door, which is exactly the kind of daily life the young family came here to find.

Timber Structure as Spatial Grammar

Retaining the original timber frame was both a preservation gesture and a spatial strategy. The exposed posts and beams give the open plan a legible rhythm, dividing the flowing ground floor into zones without requiring partitions. Ceiling joists and diagonal braces catch light differently throughout the day, and the warm tone of the wood grounds what might otherwise feel like a glass pavilion in something recognizably domestic.

Hanging planters are threaded through the structure at various heights, reinforcing the idea that the interior is continuous with the garden outside. The plywood-clad staircase, rising beside the sunroom, is the one moment where new material asserts itself against the original frame, a compact sculptural object slotted into the older grid.

Living Between Indoors and Out

What makes the ground floor genuinely compelling is not the glazing alone but the way the floor levels and material shifts signal degrees of enclosure. The curved concrete floor rises slightly toward the kitchen, creating a subtle amphitheater of daily life. Blue-painted floor bands near the dining zone mark a different register again. These are small moves, but they give the open plan a sense of territory without walls, a quality that traditional Japanese houses achieve with tatami module grids and that this renovation translates into a contemporary idiom.

Children playing on the grey floor, a parent reading on the sofa, light filtering through hanging ferns: the scenes captured here feel unforced because the architecture does not dictate posture. It simply provides a comfortable stage between roof and landscape.

Three Gardens, Three Orientations

The site now holds three distinct planted zones: a cactus garden at the front facing the road, a central garden occupying the footprint of the demolished warehouses, and a rice terrace oriented toward the sunset. Each garden corresponds to a different view and a different time of day, giving the house a rotational quality. Morning light enters through the cactus garden; afternoon light floods the central space; and the rice terrace catches the last warm glow before the valley drops into shadow.

The concrete terrace steps visible at the building's edge are a direct echo of the paddy terraces beyond. They manage the grade change practically while reinforcing the conceptual thread that ties house to hillside. It is landscape design that doubles as structural foundation, and it reads as inevitable rather than contrived.

Twilight and the Glass Envelope

At dusk, the house transforms. The traditional tile roof becomes a dark silhouette, and the glass walls turn the interior into a lantern. Pendant lights over the dining area cast warm pools on the concrete, and the timber columns glow amber. The veranda, with its exposed rafters and full-height doors thrown open, collapses any remaining boundary between house and garden.

These twilight images reveal something important about the renovation's energy balance. By removing opaque walls and maximizing glazed surface, the architects traded thermal mass for daylight and ventilation. In a rural Osaka Prefecture setting where summers are humid and winters mild, the strategy makes climatic sense. The house breathes, and the deep roof overhangs protect the glass from direct summer sun while admitting low winter light.

The Upper Floor and Its Framed Views

Upstairs, the program shifts to bedrooms and private quarters. The design strategy shifts too: instead of panoramic transparency, the second floor uses carefully positioned openings to frame specific views of the mountains and rice paddies. A light well punched through the floor connects the mezzanine to the sunroom below, ensuring that even the most private rooms share the ground floor's sense of vertical openness.

The plywood stair and mezzanine level act as a hinge between the two modes of living: communal and transparent below, intimate and curated above. It is a simple sectional move, but it gives a modest house a surprising range of spatial experiences.

Plans and Drawings

The site plans confirm how tightly the house is wedged between road and paddy. The ground floor plan shows the sunroom as a double-height wedge at the entry, with the open living and kitchen space wrapping around the central garden. The first floor plan reveals a compact bedroom zone with a balcony oriented toward the mountain backdrop and a light well that ties the two levels together.

The section drawings are the most revealing documents in the set. They show the split-level arrangement stepping down from road to rice terrace, with the front cactus garden sitting higher than the central living space and the rear terrace dropping further still. A series of nine hillside sections at the bottom of the drawing set illustrates how the house fits into the broader pattern of buildings stepping down the vegetated slope, reinforcing the argument that this is not just a house renovation but a recalibration of building and topography.

Why This Project Matters

Renovation projects in rural Japan face a particular tension. The country's traditional timber houses are structurally sound and culturally significant, but they were often designed for inward-looking family life, not for the kind of landscape engagement that contemporary clients expect. Demolition is easy; sensitive adaptation is not. What 1110 Office achieves here is a renovation that respects the original frame while fundamentally rewriting the building's relationship to its site. The terraces, the cleared sightlines, the glass walls, and the three gardens all work together to make a house that finally belongs to the hillside it sits on.

The broader lesson is about reading context before drawing plans. Photogrammetry and site surveys are standard tools, but using them to discover that the terrace geometry of a rice paddy village should become the organizing principle of a domestic interior is a genuinely creative act. In a profession that often treats landscape as backdrop, this project insists that landscape is structure. That insistence produces a home where a family can watch the seasons turn from the kitchen counter, and where a child's first memories will be of running from polished concrete to muddy paddy without ever feeling that the threshold existed.

Terraced House Renovation by 1110 Office, Chihaya Akasaka, Osaka Prefecture, Japan. Photography by Yohei Sasakura.

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