Kazuyo Sejima Renovates a Young Couple’s Century-Old Kyoto Home
A historic machiya is updated for modern life, honouring tradition, craftsmanship and community
Kazuyo Sejima, working alongside local artisans, has revived a 100-year-old machiya — a traditional Japanese townhouse on the brink of disappearing — for a young couple determined to bring it back to life.
A taxi can only get you so close to this traditional machiya, tucked at the end of a T-intersection on a pedestrian-only street in Kyoto’s Nishijin neighbourhood. But approaching the residence on foot, on a cold evening in early January, the place works its magic before you’re even in the door. It radiates a warm glow, the slatted wood façade revealing a passing glimpse of its residents inside. They’re preparing dinner.
“We’re trying to make machiya liveable in the modern era,” muses Sam Brustad, a communications consultant from New Zealand who moved to Japan more than a decade ago. He’s just pulled a roast chicken, piping hot, out of his Miele oven. When this house was originally built, more than 100 years back, cooking would have been done over an open firepit. But, as Brustad and his partner, Yuki Shirato, a lawyer turned tech entrepreneur, assemble a fine spread on their slick, stainless-steel island, they’re setting an example of how contemporary life can unfold within this age-old envelope.
Machiya, which loosely translates to town house—or Kyomachiya, in this case, since we’re in Kyoto—are traditional Japanese residences, characterised by wood beam construction, earthen walls, and tiled roofs. For centuries these were the sorts of structures that housed everyday people–often a family of five or six in a home of this scale (approximately 570 square feet). In this neighbourhood, historically known for textile production, most inhabitants would have spent their days weaving silk or other fabrics for kimonos. “Sadly, it’s a dying breed,” says Shirato, lamenting that many locals find machiya inconvenient, old-fashioned or expensive to maintain. There are fewer than 40,000 left in the prefecture and still hundreds are demolished every year. Those that are preserved are most frequently turned into shops or restaurants and rarely used for their original intention. So when Brustad and Shirato, who keep their primary residence in Tokyo, began to look for a second home, they sought out a machiya for this reason, landing on a house that was certified by the City of Kyoto for its exemplary conservation of the traditional style.
Despite that designation, it was an old house that needed work. To revive the structure, they called on Pritzker Prize–winning architecture legend Kazuyo Sejima, a cofounder of the Tokyo-based firm SANAA, who Shirato had met through mutual friends. Sejima, who hadn’t taken on a residential project in many years, was intrigued by the building’s history and the prospect of a renovation—her first. “Rather than updating the machiya to suit contemporary life, I am interested in how contemporary life can be updated within the framework of the old machiya,” she says.
That meant honouring the essence of the structure—its tsuchikabe walls made of bamboo, straw and clay; the exquisite pine ceiling beams, assembled without metal joiners; the kitchen wall stained a deep black from years of cooking by fire—while giving it that airy, transparent quality that Sejima is known for. She and her team, led by project manager and SANAA partner Yoshitaka Tanase, added a large window panel on the street-facing side and radiant heating to the concrete floors, while upstairs they created an open mezzanine that feels like it’s floating.
“Historically, the house would have been very dark,” explains Brustad, recalling the way Jun’ichirō Tanizaki described Japanese interiors in his 1933 essay, “In Praise of Shadows,” written as electric lights switched on across Japan. Tanizaki eulogised the days of candlelight, dark rooms, and wooden outhouses, writing that, “only in dim half-light is the true beauty of Japanese lacquerware revealed.”
Here, in the evening hours, you can get a taste for those before-times: The 19th-century screen, hand-painted by Sessai Tsukioka, and the Edo-era tin cups, used to serve sake, shimmer in low lighting. Upstairs in the sleeping quarters the silk threads of a kimono fabric, woven nearby, glisten. These antiques, many of which Shirato scored at auction, mix in with streamlined, modern pieces like a teak Hans Wegner table and chairs, SANAA’s rabbit-ear seats, and an Akari lantern by Isamu Noguchi, which glows in the entry.
In Sejima’s spare but thoughtful design, the inhabitants are central to the plan. “The first meetings were all about questions,” explains Shirato of their close collaboration. Would they have pets? Children? What did they like to do with their time? Brustad is an avid cook, so space for entertaining was paramount. Shirato’s priority was more personal: a deluxe bath in the back, through an open-air interior garden, designed by Mitate.
“When we were building here, a lot of the neighbours asked if it was going to be a restaurant,” says Shirato with a laugh, explaining that their 13-foot-long kitchen island is the largest piece made for a private residence by local metalworkers Konbu Brothers. These were some of the many artisans—intensely vetted—that Sejima and Tanase engaged for this project. Others were the carpenters, in the southwest of Kyoto, who built a bed, drawers and stairs out of Japanese cypress, and the craftspeople who replaced the kawara, or roof tiles. “It’s very tough to keep these crafts alive,” says Shirato, explaining that even the vernacular knowledge necessary to build a machiya is slowly slipping away. “Preserving a machiya takes a lot of effort,” he continues. “But we think keeping an existing structure for generations instead of tearing it down and rebuilding is much more sustainable.”
“Hear that?” asks Brustad, toward the end of dinner. There’s a tapping sound outside. “It’s the hinoyoujin, or fire watch. Every night people walk the neighbourhood clapping bamboo sticks to remind you to put out your fire.” Few households still burn them at night, but this centuries-old ritual has persisted. Brustad and Shirato, some of the younger members of the local district association, hope to join in one of these days, finding their place in the tight weave of the neighbourhood.
For Sejima, it was critical that the house—and its residents—exist in harmony with this community. Early in the process she presented five different design proposals, constructed out of paper. They didn’t just depict the house itself but every structure in the surrounding blocks. By studying these models, the architect and her clients could see how the home related to the neighbourhood. “She wants the building to be contained,” Shirato reflects. “But also part of the community.”
This story appeared in the print magazine for AD US.
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