Tsumugu is a one-storey timber house in Kagoshima, designed by Tokyo-based Archipatch as a working demonstration for local builder Shichiro Construction. The condition Shichiro set: all wood had to come from Kyushu, the island where the company sources its materials.

Toshihiko Suzuki's atelier sits on a mountain slope in Yamagata Prefecture. The tea-ceremony room inside is two tatami. The mizuya — where utensils are prepared before ceremony — is a vintage Airstream trailer in polished aluminium, imported from the United States, parked just outside the room.

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

IGArchitects founder Masato Igarashi designed this house in Saitama for a family of three on a 70-square-metre corner site, with a limited budget. The solution: two large concrete blocks handle all the structure and hide the service spaces.

Suzuko Yamada Architects built a three-storey house on a 24-square-metre plot in Nakano, Tokyo — and cast the furniture directly into the concrete. Stairs, shelves, surfaces: all poured as core structural elements within the shell itself.

Naoshima Ryokan ROKA in Kagawa Prefecture — the first ryokan on Japan's art island, opened April 2022. Designed by Okayama firm Nottuo (Kouhei Suzuki and Hironori Fujioka) on a former rice field. Walls are clad in tsuchi-kabe earthen plaster using soil from Awaji Island.

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.

Maana Atelier occupies a century-old textile-weaving workshop in Kyoto's Nishijin district — the same neighborhood that once produced the city's finest silk. Architecture firm Sahena Design restored the space in collaboration with local artisans.

House in Akashi gives almost nothing to the street — a timber-clad box with a parking bay and a door. Osaka-based Arbol divided the interior into three strips, each wrapped around a courtyard. One grows fruit trees. One is for drying laundry.

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.

A tea house built entirely from glass, installed on the grounds of Shoren-in temple in Kyoto. Tokujin Yoshioka completed it in 2015 as a reinterpretation of the tea ceremony — same ritual, completely different relationship with light. The glass panels act as prisms.

Biiird Yakitori in Shenzhen presents a blank concrete face to the street. The entrance is a metal door the same color as the facade, marked only by a single lamp. Nothing signals that anything is inside.

Amanemu, Ise-Shima National Park. 24 suites and 4 villas by Kerry Hill Architects, each with a private onsen bath fed by natural hot springs. Opened 2016. The sliding doors use kumiko — small wooden segments assembled with a chisel, no nails, no glue.

Three generations of the same family, one lot in Shinjuku. The previous house was a smaller timber frame, gradually overshadowed as apartment buildings went up around it.

Kusatsu Kimuraya is a one-room ryokan in Gunma Prefecture, designed by Kengo Kuma & Associates. One guest room. Restaurant on the ground floor, facing the hot spring fields directly. The exterior walls are clad in Asama stone — volcanic rock quarried from the same hot spring area.

Shirakawa-go after snowfall. The thatched roofs are built at 60 degrees — gassho-zukuri, 'hands in prayer.' The angle isn't decorative. It keeps 2 meters of annual snowfall from crushing the frame. Some of these houses are over 250 years old. 📷 hitoritabiken

A thatched-roof minka in Okayama City, bought by a potter and cook as a live-work home. Masashi Takeda of raumus kept the original timber frame and replaced the thatch with metal roofing — the ceiling is dark lauan plywood, colour-matched to the existing beams.

Tea House Senkutsu sits in the garden of Aman Kyoto. Architect Norio Toyama of Sen Art Studio designed it in sukiya style — traditional Japanese construction where joinery, material, and proportion carry all the weight that ornament won't. Thirty artisan collaborators on one building. 📷 Wallpaper*

Sushi Senju, Jingumae, Shibuya-ku, Tokyo. Kubo Tsushima Architects built a 6-seat sushi counter where the walls are finished in sumi ink plaster — the same ink used in Japanese brush painting.

Matsumotohonbako Hotel in Asama Onsen, Matsumoto. Suppose Design Office turned a 300-year-old ryokan called Koyanagi into a book hotel. 24 rooms across 5 floors, every one with a private open-air bath. Completed 2020.

Beniya Mukayu, Yamashiro Onsen, Ishikawa Prefecture — architect Kiyoshi Sey Takeyama's 16-room ryokan sits on a hilltop site used for 20 years to catalog a forest garden of pine, weeping sakura, maple, and over a dozen moss varieties.

Shigeru Ban stretched a 90-meter-long building along a ridge on Awaji Island, then cantilevered half of it over the hillside on two steel columns with a 21-meter wooden vierendeel span. The entire second floor is a zazen meditation hall.

Kengo Kuma's 413 sqm villa on Lake Kawaguchiko is organized around what he calls 'the Mount Fuji Axis,' an invisible line pointing straight at the volcano across the water. The angular roof cuts through autumn-colored forest, and the whole structure is meant to feel like a boat floating on the lake.

Hoshinoya Tokyo. An 18-story ryokan in Otemachi, between the Imperial Palace and Tokyo's financial district. 84 rooms, 6 per floor. Designed by Rie Azuma. The facade is aluminum latticework baked in jet-black resin, patterned after Edo-era kimono textiles.

The Sayama Forest Chapel uses gassho-zukuri form, the steep 'palms pressed together in prayer' roof shape from Japan's mountain farmhouses, but rebuilt in reinforced concrete and timber with 180 cast aluminum panels on the exterior.

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.

Modern Ryokan Kishi-ke, Kamakura, Kanagawa Prefecture — architect Ryohei Tanaka of G architects studio, completed 2019. Two buildings separated by a traditional garden: guests pass through the Zen garden en route from the main house to the guest annex.

Inside a dark room in Ginza, bamboo strips spiral upward in three vortexes around acrylic panels coated in polarizing film. Goldfish swim through the structures, and the polarized surfaces shift color depending on where you stand.

Hiroshi Nakamura drew water from Lake Poroto directly into the grounds of this Hokkaido hot spring resort, reshaping the landscape to echo the lake basin. Guest rooms have Ainu patterns on the wallpaper and low-table lounges modeled on the hearth where Ainu families traditionally gathered.

The Shinmonzen, Kyoto. Nine suites on Shinmonzen-dori in Gion, designed by Tadao Ando. Opened 2021. From the street it looks like any Kyoto machiya — curved roof tiles, dark latticed timber, black facade. Step inside and it's pure Ando: exposed concrete walls framing views of the Shirakawa River.

Keiji Ashizawa squeezed a three-story family home between a residential street and temple grounds in Minami-Azabu.

Kengo Kuma built a 10-seat omakase counter on the 8th floor of London's old BBC Television Centre. The bench is stacked cedar, cut to mirror the sushi counter's profile so the two forms talk to each other across the room. Above it, a wavy polyester ceiling mimics washi paper.

Hiroshi Nakamura renovated the Kasuien annex at the Westin Miyako Kyoto, a 60-year-old sukiya masterpiece originally designed by Togo Murano. The courtyard garden has cloud-shaped moss islands floating in white gravel, framed by shoji screens and dark timber columns.

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.

Le Picabier is a one-person tearoom in the mountains north of Kyoto, designed by 2m26 and Onomiau for Villa Kujoyama. The footprint is 95.5 by 64 centimeters, scaled to tatami proportions, with a cypress frame clad in charred cedar shingles and interior wood treated in kakishibu.

Four-story concrete house in Minami-Aoyama by Keiji Ashizawa Design, finished in 2023. Timber louvers wrap the facade to screen a busy intersection, while planted balconies on the living room and bedroom floors pull greenery back in.

Uchiko in Sunset Harbor, Miami Beach. Islyn Studio called it "tropical brutalism meets Japanese deco." The upper floor — Matsuyoi — flips from the bright ground-floor beach house into shou sugi ban darkness. Black terracotta tiles, deep green bar furniture, the atmosphere of a moonlit izakaya.

Two white steel staircases spiral around each other on a hillside above the Seto Inland Sea. The bride and groom climb separate paths and meet at the top, 15 meters up. The whole structure is self-supporting, no central column.

After a typhoon damaged this 1967 Kamakura house, architects Keita Ebidzuka and Eriko Masunaga stripped it to the timber frame and added four curved corner volumes for sleeping, working, and a tea room.

Tofuku-ji Hojo Garden, Kyoto — four garden rooms surrounding the abbot's hall, designed in 1939 by Mirei Shigemori, the modernist who made karesansui political.

Fukuchiyo Sake Brewery converted a 198 sqm townhouse in Hizen Hamashuku, a protected historic district in Saga Prefecture, into a small hotel and restaurant.

Shirokuro is an omakase restaurant on 2nd Avenue in New York where every surface — walls, floor, tables, chairs — is hand-painted in sumi-e ink by artist Mirim Yoo. No wallpaper, no prints. Three months of brushwork to turn a restaurant into a flat drawing you can sit inside.

Hiroshi Nakamura built a house in downtown Hiroshima behind a wall of 6,000 borosilicate glass blocks, each one 50mm x 235mm x 50mm, held together by 75 stainless steel bolts. The facade blocks traffic noise but lets sunlight refract into moving patterns across the interior garden.

Ginzan Onsen Fujiya in Obanazawa, Yamagata — Kengo Kuma's renovation of a 100-year-old ryokan in Japan's snow country. The atrium is wrapped in a screen of 1.2 million bamboo pieces, each 4mm wide, made by a craftsman from Kanazawa.

After the 2015 Owakudani eruption shook Hakone, Hiroshi Nakamura built a brewery and restaurant that leans into the volcanic landscape instead of hiding from it. A 300-year-old fallen cedar sits in the center of the dining room.

Entō, Oki Islands, 50km off Shimane. 遠島 means 'exile island' — where Japan sent emperors it wanted to forget. Mount Fuji Architects Studio built the hotel into the cliff. Cross-laminated timber. Rooms are mostly window. 📷 sora413s

Sou Fujimoto buried a holiday home under a green hill on Ishigaki Island. The concrete villa is circular, with a bowl-shaped roof planted over by landscape designer Taichi Saito so it vanishes from above. Downstairs, the sauna sits directly beneath a shallow rooftop pool.

Exposed pine trusses holding up an asymmetric vaulted ceiling. Floor-to-ceiling glass slides open to a snow-covered deck lined with birch trees. The left half of the ceiling is open structure, the right half smooth white plaster. One room, two feelings.

K5 Tokyo is a former bank. The interiors run Swedish minimalism alongside Japanese design. Two traditions with the same opinion about how much should be in a room. 📷 linear_magazine

110°C wood-fired sauna on Lake Nojiri, Nagano Prefecture. Step outside and the lake hits you. The coffee after is reportedly the best one visitor has ever had. 📷 Yu_Blogs_Sauna