ULTRA STUDIO Rescales Tokyo's Tiled Towers and Retaining Walls into a Terraced Apartment Block in Uehara

Tokyo residential streets are famous for their lack of agreement. Every plot gets its own building, its own cladding, its own idea of a front door. Spend enough time in a neighborhood like Uehara and the chaos settles into a pattern: beige-tiled apartment blocks, dark retaining walls that lift houses above the road, and shrubs spilling over plinth edges like accidental hanging gardens. Nobody designed this landscape as a whole, yet repetition has made it feel natural. ULTRA STUDIO took that invisible vernacular as the brief for Apartment in Uehara, an 899 m² residential block completed in 2025.

What interests us is the method. Instead of importing a foreign object to provoke the street, the studio, with a design team of Yuji Mukaiyama, Yushi Sasada, Alyssa Ueno, Daiyu Inoue and Akito Ikeda, works with the most ordinary pieces of the local kit and changes their scale and relationships until you notice them again. The tile becomes cylindrical towers. The retaining wall becomes a dark base the whole building stands on. The spilling planter becomes a stepped terrace. It is a familiar language, but the pronunciation is deliberately strange.

A Plinth, a Stack and a Garden Taken Seriously

From the street, the building reads as a direct answer to its neighbors. A dark stucco base does the job that retaining walls do all over this hilly, height-restricted, exclusively residential district, and the white-tiled volumes step back above it. At dusk, with a pruned pine and the usual tangle of utility wires in the frame, the block looks at home and slightly off at once, which is exactly the point.

The cylindrical tiled bays are the most legible move. Tile is the default skin of the Tokyo apartment, usually applied flat and forgotten. Wrapped around tight cylinders and pushed up as towers, it becomes sculptural. The patterned pink and white concrete planter edges do something similar for the plinth-top garden: the planting that normally escapes over a wall by accident is given a designed rim, and grasses become part of the elevation.

Circulation as a Vertical Room

Entry happens through a concrete corridor lined with pleated white panels and dark stone steps, a compressed passage that carries you out of the street level the base wall has cut off. The shared stair landing is plain: white steel railings, a raw concrete column, bare bulbs. It is generous with daylight and stingy with decoration, which suits a building whose ornament lives elsewhere.

The private stairs are a different story. Inside the round turrets, concrete treads cantilever around a central column toward a skylight. The cylinders you saw from the street are not just cladding gestures; they hold spirals that connect levels within the units. Exterior figure and interior use line up, and that honesty makes the towers feel earned rather than applied.

The Curved Tile Wall Comes Indoors

In the living spaces, the tiled cylinder enters as a curved wall that encloses the stair and organizes the room around it. Sometimes it is white, sometimes grey, punctured by an arched opening. The street material now sits beside timber floors, a pale blue cabinet and, in one unit, a gold ceiling with a hanging crystal light bar. That last combination is close to kitsch, and we think it is meant to be: the project keeps testing how much familiarity a surface can carry before it tips into strangeness.

The core also separates floor levels and finishes. A raised timber kitchen floor sits on one side, a dark-stained floor on the other, with black steps negotiating the change. The site's dramatic level shifts, flattened outside by plinths, reappear inside as small, livable changes in height.

Furniture That Behaves Like Terrain

Steps and platforms are everywhere: stepped white cabinets with black knobs, a low unit on black feet under a board-marked ceiling, a black stepped platform in an otherwise bare room. The interiors read like a miniature version of the neighborhood's terraced ground, with storage and seating standing in for retaining walls and plinths.

Color helps each apartment keep its own identity. Maroon landings lead to a glass dining table; a blue storage partition with cubbies and coat hooks stands beside a grid-tiled column; red stair treads show up behind an open blue wardrobe. Exposed concrete beams and board-marked surfaces hold it all together, so the palette reads as deliberate rather than noisy.

Kitchens and Baths with Street Memory

The service rooms carry the same logic. A doorway framed in board-marked concrete opens to a kitchen with a pivoting white panel door. A mahogany drawer counter sits under a stepped white relief band, with a clerestory pulling in treetops. Another kitchen pairs white cabinetry and a steel counter with timber shelving under a round skylight: circles again, this time as light rather than mass.

Bathrooms are where tile returns to its everyday home and gets intensified. One is wrapped in blue-green squares around a sunken tub, with a large window onto leafy canopy. Another uses a glass block wall to light a tiled shower. Both are conventional materials used with full commitment, which is the project's thesis in its simplest form.

Views over the Rooftops

Height restrictions keep Uehara low, so upper floors look across a field of roofs rather than up at towers. A long mahogany counter runs toward red-framed glazing and curved tiled walls that frame neighboring rooftops. On the roof terrace, a stepped diamond-shaped opening in concrete turns the same view into a framed picture. After a building devoted to the street's overlooked details, the roof offers the whole messy landscape back to you as something worth looking at.

Plans and Drawings

The plans confirm what the photographs suggest: irregular apartments locked around a central stair core, with spiral stairs in circular turrets along the front and thick walls carving out odd room shapes. The section shows units stacked and stepped above a basement garage, with terrace planting at each setback, which is the street's plinth-and-garden typology stacked vertically.

The unfolded interior drawings are the real pleasure. Each apartment is laid flat, walls opened out around the floor in peach, pale green, dark brown and grey, with the cylinders drawn as solid objects in the room. They show that every unit was designed as a composed interior, not a repeated floor plate.

Why This Project Matters

Much contemporary housing in dense cities picks one of two routes: blend in politely or stand out loudly. Apartment in Uehara shows a third option. By rescaling tile, retaining walls and spilling planters, ULTRA STUDIO makes a building that belongs to its street while also commenting on it. It treats the generic as raw material rather than as something to apologize for.

For architects working in cities without a coherent streetscape, that is a useful lesson. Context does not have to mean heritage or harmony. It can mean the habits a neighborhood has repeated until nobody sees them, and the designer's job is to make them visible again. Here, that idea reaches all the way from the plinth to the bathroom tile, and it holds up at every scale.

Apartment in Uehara by ULTRA STUDIO, Tokyo, Japan. Area: 899 m². Completed: 2025. Photography by Kenya Chiba.

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