NoMaDoS Wraps a Cloister Around the Core of a 44-Year-Old Morioka Apartment

Most apartment renovations start by asking what walls to tear down. NoMaDoS asked a different question: what happens when you drop a new volume into the middle of a concrete shell and let the leftover space do all the work? The Cloister Home, a 68-square-meter renovation inside a 44-year-old reinforced concrete building in Morioka, Iwate Prefecture, answers that question with a single, tilted box. Bathroom, bed, and closets sit inside this angled core, and the gaps between its walls and the existing concrete perimeter form a continuous cloister corridor that wraps the entire apartment. No room is fully enclosed. No view is blocked.

The client is a wooden basket bag weaver who needed the apartment to function as home, studio, and gallery simultaneously. That brief alone rules out conventional partitioning. Instead of assigning fixed rooms to fixed activities, NoMaDoS created a trapezoidal floor plan where furniture migrates and functions overlap. An earthen floor on the south side becomes a workshop in the morning and a dining room by evening. The cloister itself is the organizing principle: walk its loop and you pass through every zone, catching the river and cityscape through windows at each turn. It is a small apartment that feels, paradoxically, like it has no boundaries.

The Angled Core and Its Cloister

The tilted central volume is the move that makes everything else possible. By rotating the core off the orthogonal grid of the existing concrete walls, NoMaDoS generates wedge-shaped gaps that widen and narrow as you move around the perimeter. These gaps are the cloister: a circulation loop that doubles as kitchen counter frontage, reading nook, and display corridor depending on where you stand. The effect is spatial compression and release in miniature, all within 68 square meters.

What makes the strategy work is that the core absorbs only the functions that truly require enclosure: sleeping, bathing, storage. Everything else spills into the cloister zone, where daylight from the apartment's generous windows can reach it. At dusk, the space contracts into pools of warm artificial light, and the cloister's proportions shift perceptually from open gallery to intimate hallway.

Concrete Shell, Timber Insert

The material dialogue here is straightforward but well executed. The existing reinforced concrete structure, with its board-formed texture and exposed ductwork, reads as the geological layer: heavy, permanent, rough. The new plywood volumes inserted inside it are lighter in both tone and weight, their warm grain softening the industrial character of the shell. NoMaDoS did not try to hide the original building's age. The concrete ceiling remains fully exposed, its patina becoming part of the atmosphere rather than something to plaster over.

This honesty about the existing structure extends to the floor. The polished concrete underfoot ties old and new together, while the south-side earthen floor introduces a third material register, one associated with craft workshops and traditional Japanese doma spaces. For a basket weaver, working on an earthen floor is not a design affectation. It is functional common sense.

Living in the Gaps

The dining area, tucked between the plywood storage volume and the kitchen counter, is a good example of how NoMaDoS treats the cloister's irregular geometry as an asset rather than a compromise. The table sits in a wider section of the loop, directly beneath the exposed ductwork and pendant lighting designed by TILe / Yasuyoshi Iwakabe. Storage boxes stack against the core wall, doubling as display surfaces for the client's woven work. There is no dedicated dining room, and none is missed.

Peg walls mounted on the plywood surfaces allow tools, artwork, and everyday objects to be rearranged at will. For a maker whose output changes seasonally, this flexibility is essential. The apartment becomes a rotating exhibition of the client's own craft, with the cloister serving as both circulation and gallery wall.

Privacy on Demand

The grey curtains running along the corridor wall are the project's most economical privacy device. When drawn, they seal the built-in bed into a cave-like enclosure, transforming a section of the open loop into a fully private sleeping chamber. When pulled back, the bed rejoins the cloister as a daybed or reading spot. It is a simple mechanism, but it resolves the tension between openness and retreat that plagues most open-plan micro apartments.

The bathroom occupies the only truly enclosed portion of the core volume, accessed through perforated plywood panels that filter light and maintain visual texture. Pendant bulbs and a wall clock give the vanity area a domestic warmth that contrasts with the raw concrete just outside. NoMaDoS treats each threshold between core and cloister as a moment of atmospheric transition: rough to smooth, public to intimate, bright to dim.

Why This Project Matters

The Cloister Home is not a showcase of expensive finishes or complex engineering. It is a proof of concept for a spatial idea: that a single rotated volume, inserted carefully into an existing shell, can generate enough variety and flexibility to support a full domestic program in under 70 square meters. The cloister corridor is both the circulation and the room itself, collapsing the distinction between hallway and living space in a way that small apartments desperately need.

More broadly, the project argues that renovation does not have to mean erasure. The 44-year-old concrete structure is not hidden or apologized for. It is the frame within which a new, lighter architecture operates. For a client whose livelihood depends on weaving natural fibers into functional objects, there is a fitting parallel: the apartment is itself a kind of weave, threading new timber through old concrete, leaving both visible, letting neither dominate.

The Cloister Home, designed by NoMaDoS, Morioka, Iwate Prefecture, Japan. 68.40 m². Completed 2022. Lighting design by TILe / Yasuyoshi Iwakabe. Construction by EIKOU Corporation. Photography by Kentaro Yoshida.

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