the flooring is installed, and the ceiling and walls are sheathed in plasterboard so the place is really almost ready for primetime. two more weeks and the work will be complete. we are looking forward to all of the detailed work to be completed, but more than that really want to see how the sliding doors are going to come out. They are the really sexy bit for this wee project.

the new living room space will be entered through a set of doors that slide into a pocket when not in use. The front part of the pocket isn’t built yet in the image below, so it looks kind of odd to us. The top rail for the doors is also supposed to be embedded in the ceiling, so there should only be a thin line visible and not the thick hardware in the image below. its’s a small thing though and the rest of the work is coming along quite nicely in spite of a few surprises here and there.

Framing is more or less finished and the final job of closing the walls and ceilings wih plasterboard is underway.  The  spaces will begin to become clear in the next few days and we’ll know if we got the design right or not.  The planning works quite well but it is the space that is in the end the most important, so it really needs to be built to see if it is going to shape up the way we expected or not.  So far so good.

ok, it isn’t really frigidaire. but the ductwork and machinery for the new heating cooling system is being installed. This is the first time we have tried this type for residential use – a very streamlined system with the vents and intake all placed in the ceiling, leaving the walls and floors open and clear, and the final look hopefully mostly vanishing into the ceiling. The long thin vent hanging from the ceiling on the right in the photo below is one of the new air outlets.  The black shadow marks the new ceiling height so only the long slit should be visible when all is done.

at the same time th new sub-floor and basic framing are well underway and should be completed in the next few days.

The new entrance to the bathroom is being boxed off from the living room entrance to create a bit of privacy. The original floor finish however is simply too nice to waste, so we have retained a small patch of it here.

unfortunately we couldn’t do the same for the new entrance hall without creating lots of odd bumps. Still, it is a small price to pay for the much better feeling at the front door, spatially. What was once a blank wall is now looking more like this…

it should clean up very nicely indeed.

given complete freedom we prefer to create lots of connections between rooms, making circuits that give an impression and maybe even the reality of larger space because there are options – no dead ends.

if we could we would love to break a hole through the wall dividing the living room and the dining room, but with the budget available that was not an option (concrete structural walls resist cheap modification).  So the design instead became more about opening up space (literally) and playing with the details to create an impression of depth.  To do that we chose to use a series of planes along the walls and ceiling, that are broken up to accomodate a light shelf, doors, and a tv nook.  The corners of the room don’t quite connect directly so that the space has a feeling of continuing a bit more than if it were just a bunch of boxy dead ends.

We will keep a little bit of an asian feel by using sliding doors finished in washi (japanese paper) and  perforated  in the same manner we used to make the stairway wall in the yoyogi house.  We think there is still a lot of room to experiment with that technique and this seems a good place to try it out.

In the meantime removal of the walls and floor and ceiling is complete and new finishes are going to go up shortly.

The brackets in the wall in the picture above are for the airconditioning unit.  We are upgrading the AC for the room whil we are at it and instead of taking up a lot of space in the walls have moved it to the ceiling. This gives us about a full square meter of space to inhabit, which is no small matter.

The front hall from two perspectives.  In the upper image the wall to the left is now removed, creating a connection directly from the living rom area to the front hall.  The final finish floor is going to be raised, and the Washroom (the door at the bottom of the existing steps) will be boxed off to make it more private, so a new set of steps will be added in the newly opened area.

we have been neglecting this blog recently as we have been working on various projects in the office and academic research, but have begun to get on track finally. hopefully we will have things to post from now on at a more regular pace.

to start with, a small renovation project for a multi-story flat in akasaka.

this is a continuation of a project we began last year. The flat altogether is over 200 m2 and includes a large Japanese Tea-house and Japanese style room, found in a kind of half-basement a meter below the main ground level.

In the first set of renovations, we changed almost every part of the home, but left the japanese rooms as they were – we thought removing them would be a waste.

but it turns out the ex-pats who this flat is to be rented to are by and large unsure what to do with the tatami room and especially the tea-house. in the end the design was just too specific to the previous inhabitants.

There are also a few issues with the planning that causes some difficulties, including a blank wall at the entrance, and the need to go down about a meter and then right back up again to enter the living room, which is rather an odd pattern for daily life if you aren’t going to use the tea-room that requires it.

so we are currently removing the japanese room entirely, changing access to the space so it can be entered directly from the front hall, and basically remaking the space into a single large living area. The space is a luxury for Tokyo and the three windows along the outside walls make for a nice atmosphere that was not visible when the space was subdivided. The design still requires taking a few steps down to enter the space, but at least it will not be mirrored by steps going back up, and the final plan will be much more open.

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