Apartments in Odai

Masaki Komatsu

• Architects

This is a renovation of an apartment in Adachi-ku, Tokyo.

The room to be renovated is on the first floor facing the Arakawa River and has an open garden where a family of three and their dog live.

The floor is covered with the same tiles from the entrance to the dining room, which leads to the garden, creating an earthen floor-like structure that connects the two rooms as one. Next to the dining room is a small tatami room separated by a shoji screen. This room is used as a living room where the family relaxes during the day, and as a bedroom where the futon is laid out at night.

photo_credit Masaki Komatsu — Masaki Komatsu

In order to live together with the dog, the tiled floor is a place where the dog can spend its free time, while the bedroom is separated from the living area by the small tatami room.

In order to create a rich living space in a limited area like an apartment, we went back to the starting point of living and thought together with the client about what kind of way of living would be best.

In the course of this dialogue, we decided to choose a way of living that does not have specific bedrooms, just as in the old Japanese houses.

By eliminating fixed bedrooms, we were able to create a space for storage, maintenance, and training of bicycles for hobbies at the entrance, and a study that we envisioned could be used as a child's room in the future.

In addition, between the garden and the interior, we attempted to expand the space by creating a slightly taller bench for drying clothes and connecting the interior to the garden. By hanging the laundry on the other side of the bench, the typical apartment scene of laundry always hanging outside the window is eliminated, and the window can be opened to enjoy the outside view while spending a pleasant time.

The design is ambiguous, with no private rooms, so we were conscious of the boundaries between spaces and objects, such as the difference in the height of the floor, the change of materials, the fine latticework of the shoji screens, and the steel pillars and duckboards. This led to an improvement in the quality of the space, not only in terms of appearance, but also in terms of strength and expansion of use.