A project consisting of a housing for extremely small studios for rent called 'one-room mansions' and an independent residence built on the same site. The vicinity is a residential area that preserves the good old atomsphere of downtown Tokyo, a charming urban block where double to triple-storied, mid-scaled apartments and houses stand at small intervals in orderly rows.

Assuming that to incorporate the owner's residence into the housing complex would make the volume much too large compared to the neighboring buildings, we chose to separate the houses and arrange them independently. Our idea was that by doing so this area's urban pattern made of repeated sequence of small buildings and voids might be maintained, and each household might be provided with a tiny garden. Because the group of independent buildings has no common structure as a whole, size and shape of each building can be designed separately.

 As a result a variety of house types came to be created: triple-storied house; square house half buried below ground; house with extremely high ceiling; house surrounded by a garden on four sides. They are crammed into the site, generating a diversity of exterior spaces such as small gardens and alleyways. Relationship between each house with its garden is different in variation. Our attempt is to create living spaces typical of Tokyo, where life is not enclosed solely within the indoor space but continues from indoors to garden and alleyways.