finding the right wood flooring for this project took some time.   There are a lot more types of flooring available recently, imported from Europe or from China, but the majority of homes use an engineered wood veneer that is more plastic than wood in many cases.   Some of these can look quite good, but in general they are more akin to wallpaper in their regularity and lack the character of solid flooring.

In our search for just the right material we ended up contacting every flooring company we could find in Japan and finally found one that makes solid flooring for a reasonable price, and in the color range the clients wanted.  As I mentioned in the last post the material was approved just a few days ago  -and within moments the builder immediately started installing the wood on the ground floor and the third floor.  Since then they have been moving at full speed.

flooring 1f

flooring 3f

In the case of the third floor we decided to order the wood unfinished.  It is an ash that has been cured to improve dimensional stability for use with radiant floor heating, but the regular finishes from the factory are a bit lighter than we wanted, and so we will have the painter put on a dark stain and seal the floor in situ.  In both cases the wood is really quite beautiful, and I am glad we took the time to find it.  It really goes to show the difference between using the standard flooring that most builders are familiar with and spending the time to find a material that is right for just this house and just for this client.

The crew is preparing the house for the final finishes.

Plasterers have been dodging the rain all week to try and get the exterior wall finished.  They are impressively fast and appear to be quite content to work in very narrow spaces.   That building sites in Tokyo are always so tight means they must have to do things like this fairly often.

putting second layer of mortar on the south wall

first layer finished on third floor

looking from deck across living room

They are putting on three layers of mortar so it means covering every face of the house 3 times, which is not so easy to do in the middle of rainy season.  So far we have been lucky though and are only losing a few says here and there.  The mortar is the fireproofing for the wood structure on the outside and will be finished with a final layer of smooth mortar and a layer of waterproofing paint.

On the inside the fireproofing is provided by a layer of plasterboard, which will be painted.

plaster on third floor steps to the roof

plaster in living room

flooring

The flooring on the first two floors is a solid rose-wood, which has a bit more variation in color than we were expecting.  We put together a sample in the hallway and discussed with the client before deciding to separate the pieces into groups based on the darkness of the wood.  That way each room will have a slightly distinct shade to it.  On the third floor we are using an ash, which we will finish on site with a dark stain.  We are using the ash instead of Rosewood because it has been treated to be dimensionally stable when used with radiant floor heating.

mortar bed prepared for radiant floor-heating panels

Meanwhile on the ground floor the front hall will be finished with terrazzo tiles,so we need to prepare a bed of mortar to bring the floor level up to the right height.  Beneath the mortar there is also a layer of rigid insulation.

Although the front hall will not be inhabited per se we are putting in a simple heating system in the form of radiant floor heating.  To make the substructure level it means doing the job in two stages, with the mortar bed in the first stage set a bit lower than in the second.  In that way a kind of depression is made so the top of the  radiant heating panels will be the same as the top of the mortar bed.  Once the first layer of mortar is set and the heating system is in place the tile installer will be ready to fill the rest of the floor  with mortar, and put in the tiles (which are sitting in pallets in the yard and looking beautiful).  Theoretically as soon as next week.

The site is getting crowded with trades, and everything appears to be moving forward at the same time.  Getting them all to work together so that one group isn’t damaging the work of the other is a thankless task, but our site foreman is doing pretty good keeping up with things.

The lathe and housewrap underlay are installed and currently waiting on the rain to stop so we can put in about 25 mm of mortar.  That will be the final finish for the house, and also provides the mandated fireproofing that is required for wood construction.

front door

front facade from below

The underlay looks quite cool in itself to be honest.  It’s almost a shame to cover it up.

Other things going on include the electrician drilling holes to put in the down-lights, both on the inside and the outside…

drilling holes for lighting in car park area

2f hall

…while on the third floor the last of the windows are going in place…

checking the sash to be placed over the stairs…

and installing it

…and the waterproofing crew are working on the stairs to the roof.  This is an elaborate process, beginning with a layer of asphalt waterproofing placed over the fireproofed stairs, which are then covered with a metal lathe that is going to be finished with a layer of mortar.  Above that we will put in metal angles which will be protected by a final layer of waterproofing.  These will support the final wooden steps, and a metal handrail, and the entire system will also be connected to the waterproofing below the windows.  It should look quite nice when all put in place.

lathe for mortar on steps to roof deck

I mentioned in early posts about this project that i would try to cover the design process as well as document construction, and so I am offering up a few sketches that show at least a little of that.   I guess the diagrams i put up last week tell some of the story too, but even with those diagrams we could have made an entirely different design – and to be perfectly honest there were  few times when we really thought we would.

for instance, after we had worked out the basic approach – to flip the housing typology and put the living on the top floor and the bedrooms below – our very first idea was to make a visible connection to the roof deck a feature of the living floor.

This was an idea  we ended up keeping, actually, although we did end up flipping the stairs around to the other side of the house, for the simple reason that the stairs placed in the first version required walking through the kitchen to get to the living area.  In hindsight i like the way things worked out because it means that it is possible to step outside from 3 of the 4 walls of the living room floor.  That would not have been possible in this earlier version.

Other design decisions were not so easy though.  the kitchen for example was very difficult to resolve, because we had to work out a way for the dumbwaiter to be close to the kitchen and work on the floors below as well.  We were also trying to work out a way to use the stairs to bring light down to the ground floor at the same time, leading to an elaborately additive design like this

which did not quite work, and had the disadvantage of cutting the top floor into two areas and exposed the kitchen too much.  It did lead us to propose a more dynamic stairway to the roof however that i still fancy a wee bit, myself.

Unfortunately, this version meant far too much of the legally limited plot coverage area was being “wasted” for the exterior stairs, so we set the design aside.  perhaps it will be used another day for another project.

You might also notice we were in early days thinking of using columns on the building perimeter on the ground floor.  Shortly after this point we spoke to our engineer (alan burden, a very talented engineer here in tokyo) who showed us how we could do away with them entirely…and so we did.

These sketches are not really a fair representation.  We also made about a dozen study models and a couple of sketchbooks worth of designs, but these are probably the most interesting images of the lot.  In the end the design took about five or six months to sort out entirely, and work our way towards getting the building permit from the city.  We went through many variations and redesigns in the process, which is pretty normal for us.  In comparison to my old firms i think we spend more time working out ways to get higher quality for our clients without increasing the budget, and that necessarily means working through more design variations.  But it also means we get a better design in the end.  In economically difficult times like we are in right now I am glad for the pressure to perform that way actually.  It means we spend our time working out ways to get more effect for less cost, but i think makes for a building with lasting impact and quality.  Which is surprisingly not as common a goal in the building industry as one might expect.

this is not about the building or construction so much as a simple observation about light.

recently on a site visit i found the workers taking a break in the kids room and grabbed this shot.  it reminded me of a painting by vermeer somehow.  not sure why – something about the evenness of the light in the room; perhaps it is the towels gathered around the workmen’s heads to battle the sweat of working in the tokyo summertime heat; or maybe just the feeling of a quiet moment in time.

 

it is nice to see too that the children’s room is going to have beautiful natural light flooding in through the day, even though it faces north.  combined with the view over the green covered road that leads to the site and i think this is actually a rather nice room.