At Hakone, a spa town wedged between the mountains and the forests of Kanagawa Prefecture, in Japan, the architect Yota Hokibara of HAMS and, Studio has renovated a detached house from the 1960s, turning it into a residence with a guesthouse. Due to its location and orientation, the single-storey building, set on a concrete plate with piles driven into the wooded slope, offers cool spaces sheltered by the trees. The approach to the renovation has been to preserve the existing spatial organization: a centripetal layout hinged on the living room. “In keeping with the original logic of the house I created the traditional open/covered space that in Japan connects the rooms with the world outside – but with an unusual circular shape. Since the raised level of the engawa continues on the inside in the form of a platform that can also be used to sit on, the living room has become a sunken area (doma), defined by the suspended wooden walkway that runs around it,” explains Hokibara.

If the introversion has been handled through a minimal intervention that brings domestic life and landscape closer together, the palette in similar fashion takes on the reddish-brown tones of the roof and façades. Restored to its original vividness, this colour has in fact been extended to the added elements, including the engawa that rings the dining area and lounge and stitches together the spaces located around the perimeter. To the west is located the master bedroom, connected with the living area by a traditional sliding door (shoji); on the opposite side is the detached sleeping area for guests, consisting of two twin bedrooms. On the terraced north front – a natural extension of the living room – the wooden strip passes through the continuous glass wall, turning into a seat, while a pergola follows the curved profile, framing the view. Finally, to the south, near the entrance, are located the open kitchen with a pantry, the bathroom with a separate shower-tub room and the outdoor ofuro (traditional bathroom).

Helping to mark a permeable threshold between this service area and the rest of the house are the lush plants that sprout from the floor covered with a fitted carpet and the vertical structures, connected to the rafters of the roof, left in view. “The large wooden beam, brought to light during the construction work, redefines the character of the central space, which is further illuminated by the skylight located at the ridge of the roof, created following the removal of a ventilation grille,” concludes the architect. All this is the product of a surgical restyling, viewed through the lens of Japanese culture as a sequence of concentric enclosures: the valley of Hakone bounded by mountains, the lot amidst the trees, the rooms gathered around the doma and finally the engawa, the red ring that blurs the boundary between the intimacy of residence and the complementary green of the surrounding nature.

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