Kengo Kuma's Nakagawa-machi Bato Hiroshige Museum of Art is wrapped in louvers cut from local cedar. Their staggered layers echo Hiroshige's woodblock prints, breaking sunlight into overlapping lines. Fire retardant and preservative let the cedar double as roofing. 📷 Mitsumasa Fujitsuka / KKAA

Edo kiriko traces to 1834, when Kyubei Kagaya adapted Dutch glassware into his own cutting style. Toru Horiguchi now holds the craft as the third generation to carry the name Shuseki, passed from his grandfather Ichio to master craftsman Tomio Suda before reaching Toru.

The Kondo Museum in Kyoto sits along the Chawan-zaka approach to Kiyomizu-dera Temple, in the Higashiyama district.

Sagawa Art Museum in Moriyama, Shiga is showing Kichizaemon X, a collaboration series now in its 13th edition pairing an industrial designer with a ceramics dynasty. This round pairs nendo with Raku Kichizaemon XV, fifteenth in a line of tea-bowl makers.

Morimata Ryokan's lobby is split by two inserted boxes at different heights: one raised 150mm above the floor for sofa seating, the other 300mm higher for a tatami floor-seating area.

Yomogino Ryokan's hot spring bath in Fukushima was rebuilt after the 2011 earthquake off Japan's Pacific coast damaged the original structure. Architect Ryuichi Sasaki of Sasaki Architecture designed the replacement, completed that same year.

Jo Nagasaka of Schemata Architects renovated a wooden two-story ryokan on Tsushima, off Nagasaki, into hotel jin. Built in 1868, the first year of Meiji, it stood on Omachi-dori near the ferry terminal in Izuhara.

Hotel Siro, completed in 2020 in Tokyo's Ikebukuro district, drops the sealed hotel box entirely. Mount Fuji Architects gave each floor its own open stairway, echoing the exposed stair alleys of Nagasaki and Onomichi.

Maruhiro, a hasamiyaki ceramics maker founded in Saga prefecture in 1957, turned an 86-year-old townhouse into its new office. Architect Daisuke Motogi led the renovation, called Ouchi.

A pottery workshop and shop for 300-year-old Obori Soma ware, built in 2021 in Nishigo, Fukushima, after the kiln's home village of Namie stayed under evacuation orders following the 2011 disaster.

In Kumamoto, architect Hiroshi Nishimura of Work Visions designed Shinsui Public Bathhouse after a client asked for a sento in the summer of 2018.

Nendo built Tenri Station Plaza CoFuFun, a 6,000-square-meter public plaza in Tenri, Nara prefecture, near Kyoto. The site is made from a cluster of precast concrete mounds, each shaped after kofun, the ancient burial tombs scattered across the Japanese countryside.

Japan's pavilion at Expo 2025 Osaka-Kansai is a circular ring of cross-laminated timber, designed by Oki Sato of Nendo with Nikken Sekkei. The CLT is made by slicing small-diameter logs into thin laminae and pressing them into layered boards, a method that widens what low-value timber can become.

nendo's first large-scale retrospective opened at Design Museum Holon in Israel in June 2016, running five months across the museum's ground and upper floors.

The Nao Washi Paper Mill has operated in Saga Prefecture for more than 300 years, but repeated landslides in the surrounding mountains forced the family to move it to a flat field at the foot of the range.

A 170-year-old Kyoto ryokan, repeatedly expanded and rebuilt, looked original from the street but felt tired inside. Ohno Atelier's 2013 renovation kept that old facade, guest rooms unchanged, while updating every system underneath.

Rejected ceramic pieces from Hasami-cho's kilns now form the structure and floors of the town's new Maruhiro flagship store.

Seven centuries of Japanese carpentry lives in kigumi, interlocking wooden joints that grip each other without nails, glue, or screws. The technique is fully displayed at a small, unmarked museum in Tokyo that opened in 2015.

Forty-five guest rooms at KAI Yufuin scatter across rice-terraced slopes in Yufuin, Oita Prefecture. Some sit in the paddies, others in the forest above, each designed to yield to its surroundings rather than dominate. That restraint is Kengo Kuma's philosophy. Mount Yufu rises beyond the fields.

The ceramics on your table were made steps away. KOYO BASE, Koyo Toki's ceramic studio and café in Toki, Gifu, integrates production with dining across 449 m². You can watch tableware being shaped, fired, and finished from your table.

Steep mountain terrain shaped this chapel and visitor center at Hyogo's cemetery, built around a monumental staircase that splits the grounds. David Chipperfield Architects positioned both as boundaries between outer world and inner quiet. The chapel itself has no artificial heat or electric light.

Latticework patterns define the facade of Sadasuke Bettei ICHIJO in Hyogo's Kasumi region. Supermania's 2021 design uses random lattices and varied assembly techniques, echoes of how regional craftspeople historically adapted their designs by occupation and location.

A potter family's home and ceramic gallery, both under one long gable roof in Arita. Kitorepe architects kept the kiln in a separate workshop next door, then designed a semi-outdoor porch to buffer the private spaces from the surrounding roads.

In 2023, a public bathhouse opened in Komae, west of Tokyo. Schemata Architects and Jo Nagasaka designed Komaeyu, a 994 m² sento. Turquoise tile wraps the interior, an unexpected choice for a neighborhood bathhouse tradition.

Kanazawa Umimirai Library (2011) by Coelacanth K&H embeds 6000 circular glass blocks in concrete. Daylight scatters through each block, filling the interior with moving light and shadow. The design solves an urban constraint: a library that feels open and full of light instead of enclosed.

Shuji Hisada designed this house in a farming village. Almost entirely wood—structure, walls, interior finishes. Built for one parent and three daughters. The garden and terrace were left open so the family could design them freely.

Takashi Yamaguchi's Glass Temple (1998) sits underground at Mt. Funayama in Kyoto, within the grounds of Reigenko-ji—commissioned by Emperor Gomizuno-o in 1638. Skylight enters through a frosted glass shaft that diffuses and softens it.

A sukiya-style residence in Narutaki, western Kyoto, renovated by kooo architects into a private home with three guest rooms. Juraku plaster on walls and ceilings, hinoki bath, tatami rooms, tokonoma, engawa, doma passage linking the two wings — the full vocabulary, intact.

Keiichi Yanagihashi designed House in Takahatayama for his own family — a single continuous interior in the Tama Hills, southwest of Tokyo, where rooms are defined by changes in floor level and light rather than partition walls. The entire interior is lined with hinoki plywood.

A library buried under a working farm in Chiba, Japan. Hiroshi Nakamura & NAP sited the building below the cultivated soil layer so the microorganisms and native plants above it wouldn't be disturbed. From the surface, the roof reads as a water droplet pressed into the ground.

Zaha Hadid Architects designed a stepped coastal retreat for NOT A HOTEL in Japan. Each floor sets back from the one below, following the coastline's contour. Full-height glazing on every ocean-facing wall. These are renders, not built yet. 📷 designboom

Maruhon Ryokan's bathhouse sits at the junction between two wings of a 17th-century hotel complex in Gunma prefecture.

Kengo Kuma wrapped a former public hall in Chikujo Town with wooden louvers that fan outward like branches, turning the 2,846 sqm building into something between a library and a grove. The timber is local Keichiku hinoki cypress.

A villa at the summit of the Boso Peninsula, two buildings connected by corridors at ground and second-floor level. From above, the plan traces an infinity sign. Designed by Tai Katsuma Architecture Design Office, completed 2025 in Futtsu, Chiba. The site used to be a mountain peak.

Masakazu Tsujibayashi built his own house on a triangular plot in Osaka where three roads meet. The upper floor is clad in the same material as the roof and shaped with a pitch that follows the site's geometry — the eave it creates faces a different street on each side.

A steel hut placed on top of an 18-year-old reinforced concrete building in Shinagawa, Tokyo. Designed by PERSIMMON HILLS architects, completed 2024. Adding steel on top of an existing RC structure would have overloaded it. So the team cut away part of the existing rooftop slab first.

A 50-year-old farmhouse in Goshogawara, Aomori, empty for five years. The owner's grandfather was an apple farmer — his storehouse is still attached to the west wall. Shotaro Oshima Design Studio kept the exterior completely intact.

A house in Nakano, Tokyo, built into a site that gets no useful south light. Designed by Hiroyuki Onuma Architectural Design, completed 2025.

A painter's house on a hillside below Mount Asama in Komoro, Nagano. Designed by KKALA, completed 2025. The section follows the natural slope exactly. Floors step up in terraces around a central atelier — each room at a slightly different level, connected by the gradient of the ground itself.

In Nerima Ward, Tokyo, Shin Aoki and Partners pulled a compact house back from the street line — opening a private terrace and garden where most buildings here push flush to the sidewalk.

A 34-year-old house in Hatsukaichi, Hiroshima — corner lot, hilltop, views of the Seto Inland Sea and Miyajima to the south. Designed by ure, completed 2024. The new owners are the third family to live here. The house was solidly built and well cared for; it didn't need to be remade.

Three squares, each rotated 45° to the street, set side by side on a tight lot near Inokashira Park in Mitaka, Tokyo. The rotation carves garden pockets between the diamonds — you can't face the neighbors without also facing a garden.

A 70mm paper balloon weighing 4.5g hangs in an 8m stairwell void in this Kanagawa house. It moves year-round from the slow drift of air through the building. The house doubles as a café and a family home.

Suzuko Yamada Architects built a house on 26 square meters in Nakano, Tokyo — lot edge to edge, no setback. The concrete perimeter is thick enough to contain the staircase, storage, and a parallel set of cat walkways running at a different level from the human ones.

A courtyard house in Hayama, Kanagawa — a resort town where narrow lanes thread between summer villas. Designed by Fujiwara Muro Architects (藤原・室建築設計事務所), completed 2025. The site sits in a dense residential pocket. Privacy was the constraint; the courtyard was the answer.

Plan 21's Small House in Kawasaki is built almost entirely in cypress — pillars, beams, and exterior cladding from the same timber. Architect Umihiko Cho kept the roofline intentionally low to avoid standing out in an established residential neighborhood outside Tokyo.

From the street it reads as a low-pitched gable — a single-story house in Shizuoka. Step inside and you have the full volume of two floors. Ishizaki Architectural Design folded two different roof pitches over an L-shaped plan. The ridge runs diagonally, pulling the eye toward the far corner.

Nendo split a weekend house into six cottages on a 5,800-square-meter hillside in Karuizawa. Each cottage is about 20 square meters and handles a single function — kitchen, dining, one bedroom each. The family of four gets individual spaces without sharing walls.

Yuji Okitsu arrived at this 90-year-old house in Kamakura to find only the pillars. Floors, walls, and ceilings had been stripped out — just exposed wooden posts standing among the hillside trees. He left them visible. The renovation preserves the original framework rather than concealing it.

The Kanagawa Institute of Technology campus in Atsugi had plenty of multifunctional rooms. What it did not have was a place to do nothing in particular.