During certain hours, refracted light breaks into what Yoshioka describes as flowers across the interior walls. The tearoom has always been about controlled experience of space. This one just uses a different material to do it. 📷 Yasutake Kondo

A tea house built entirely from glass, installed on the grounds of Shoren-in temple in Kyoto. Tokujin Yoshioka completed it in 2015 as a reinterpretation of the tea ceremony — same ritual, completely different relationship with light. The glass panels act as prisms.

The contrast between the sealed exterior and the warm, loud interior is deliberate. The yakitori grill is the thing they're hiding behind that concrete.

Through the door: a U-shaped bar and a mass of red brick with a form that tapers as it drops — designed to look like it's slowly pouring out from the ceiling down to meet the bar. Uplighting makes the brick glow from below.

Biiird Yakitori in Shenzhen presents a blank concrete face to the street. The entrance is a metal door the same color as the facade, marked only by a single lamp. Nothing signals that anything is inside.

The pavilions are contemporary minka — traditional farmhouse forms rebuilt at resort scale. 📷 Yellowtrace

The technique dates to the Asuka Era, around 600 AD. Exterior is dark-stained Japanese cedar under Eishiro tile roofing in fumigated silver. Inside, pale oak veneer walls and a 2,000 sqm spa. The 33-meter infinity pool faces Ago Bay.

Amanemu, Ise-Shima National Park. 24 suites and 4 villas by Kerry Hill Architects, each with a private onsen bath fed by natural hot springs. Opened 2016. The sliding doors use kumiko — small wooden segments assembled with a chisel, no nails, no glue.

That's the detail that makes the house readable from the street.

Nendo moved the new three-storey structure to the north end of the site to get it clear of the shadow — and to keep a persimmon tree the previous occupants had planted. The steel and concrete steps interrupting the facade don't lead anywhere useful.

Three generations of the same family, one lot in Shinjuku. The previous house was a smaller timber frame, gradually overshadowed as apartment buildings went up around it.

The material and the landscape share an origin. Kusatsu Onsen is one of Japan's most famous hot spring towns. Building in it with stone pulled from it is either obvious or quietly precise.

Kusatsu Kimuraya is a one-room ryokan in Gunma Prefecture, designed by Kengo Kuma & Associates. One guest room. Restaurant on the ground floor, facing the hot spring fields directly. The exterior walls are clad in Asama stone — volcanic rock quarried from the same hot spring area.

Machiya are disappearing across Kyoto: the repairs cost more than demolition, and most owners choose to rebuild.

Shirakawa-go after snowfall. The thatched roofs are built at 60 degrees — gassho-zukuri, 'hands in prayer.' The angle isn't decorative. It keeps 2 meters of annual snowfall from crushing the frame. Some of these houses are over 250 years old.
📷 hitoritabiken

The plan splits into three zones via sliding doors: doma earthen floor (her kiln room), daytime living, sleeping. Open all three and it's 90 m² under a 4-meter hipped ceiling. 📷 Norihito Yamauchi / raumus.jp

A thatched-roof minka in Okayama City, bought by a potter and cook as a live-work home. Masashi Takeda of raumus kept the original timber frame and replaced the thatch with metal roofing — the ceiling is dark lauan plywood, colour-matched to the existing beams.

Tea House Senkutsu sits in the garden of Aman Kyoto. Architect Norio Toyama of Sen Art Studio designed it in sukiya style — traditional Japanese construction where joinery, material, and proportion carry all the weight that ornament won't.

Thirty artisan collaborators on one building.

📷 Wallpaper*

Before you reach the counter, you cross a gravel garden with white cobblestones and stepping stones. The glass facade makes the whole space read like a small tea house dropped into a residential block near Omotesando. 61.7 sqm, four private rooms behind the counter. 📷 Nacasa & Partners

The color graduates from pale grey near the entrance to near-black at the counter, so your eyes adjust as you walk deeper in. The approach is deliberate sensory reduction. Dim lighting, minimal furniture, almost no visual information. The idea: if you can't see much, you taste more.

Sushi Senju, Jingumae, Shibuya-ku, Tokyo. Kubo Tsushima Architects built a 6-seat sushi counter where the walls are finished in sumi ink plaster — the same ink used in Japanese brush painting.

The name means "book box." Red carpet runs through concrete corridors like rust-preventive paint on steel. 📷 Kenta Hasegawa

They stripped the old building to its reinforced concrete skeleton and left it raw — exposed blocks, ceiling plates, original structure. The former swimming pool became a reading corner surrounded by thousands of books. The old bathhouse and banquet hall became the restaurant and library.

Matsumotohonbako Hotel in Asama Onsen, Matsumoto. Suppose Design Office turned a 300-year-old ryokan called Koyanagi into a book hotel. 24 rooms across 5 floors, every one with a private open-air bath. Completed 2020.

Member of Relais & Châteaux.

Each room: tatami floors, Japanese paper, bamboo, diatomaceous earth walls, private open-air onsen overlooking the trees. The Byakuroku suite (110 m²) has a wooden terrace extending toward the forest. Identity design by Kenya Hara of MUJI. Cuisine served on Kutani pottery and Yamanaka lacquerware.

Beniya Mukayu, Yamashiro Onsen, Ishikawa Prefecture — architect Kiyoshi Sey Takeyama's 16-room ryokan sits on a hilltop site used for 20 years to catalog a forest garden of pine, weeping sakura, maple, and over a dozen moss varieties.

At night the timber-and-glass structure glows like a lantern floating above the forest canopy. The building is 7.2 meters wide for its full 90-meter length, which makes it essentially a hallway that achieved enlightenment.

Shigeru Ban stretched a 90-meter-long building along a ridge on Awaji Island, then cantilevered half of it over the hillside on two steel columns with a 21-meter wooden vierendeel span. The entire second floor is a zazen meditation hall.

From inside, every room frames Fuji differently. It also has a pickleball court, because apparently even sacred mountain axes need recreation.