Akio Isshiki Architects rebuilt a 73-square-metre (786-square-foot) wooden house in Akashi, Japan, around a single design principle: mixing everything the property touches, from nationality to time, into one structure. The result, House in Hayashisaki Matsue Beach, stacks a curry restaurant on the ground floor beneath the architect’s own home and workplace, inside a building whose frame is decades old. The most literal expression of that mixing sits underfoot, in a floor of handcrafted tile that reroutes a local craft toward a continent it has never touched.
A tile floor borrowed from elsewhere. The building’s dirt floor is finished in tile because the surrounding area was once a major producer of the material — a regional craft Isshiki chose to revive rather than replace with something generic. The tiles were handcrafted one by one by Awaji tile craftsmen, their texture and edge shape modeled on the lava stone pavements found in Central and South American cities. A local tradition is redirected toward an image from another hemisphere, and neither cancels the other out.
Sudare standing in for nets. That same logic runs through the shoji screen renovation throughout the house, layered with nets that resemble mosquito netting and sudare blinds, conscious of both the tropics and nostalgia at once. The imperfect partitions — shoji, fusuma — are typical of older Japanese houses, and here they’re joined by drooping, tropical-native plants that separate the rooms without fully closing them off.
A wall mixed with rust. Facing the sea, the second-floor wall is a red iron oxide plaster wall, scraped and finished by a plasterer from Awaji rather than painted or tiled. “This is an attempt to incorporate the colorful walls of each country into architecture in a Japanese context,” said Akio Isshiki. The wall reads as pigment worked into the plaster itself, not a finish applied on top of it.
Old beams stacked over new. Structurally, old and new pillars and beams are left jumbled rather than separated into distinct phases, and new shoji screens are layered so the building’s existing figured glass still shows through them. A door handle Isshiki bought on a trip, of unknown age, was installed as-is. Nothing here is dated to a single moment.
A cypress column on raw stone. One cypress pillar on natural stone stands without a formal base, aiming for a feeling closer to found timelessness than construction. “Materials with various time axes are mixed and coexist,” according to the studio — newly added elements were chosen specifically for how they’ll age, rather than for how they look on completion day.
A restaurant below, a home above. The ground floor operates as a public curry restaurant in Akashi; everything above it is Isshiki’s own residence and studio. A similar instinct — treating an old building’s structure as material rather than obstacle — shaped Kuma & Elsa’s renovation of Nakano House in Fukuoka, where the engawa corridor was kept rather than removed.
A coastal street, a working shoreline. Hayashisaki sits on a coastal stretch of Hyogo Prefecture, and the sea shapes the project as much as any material choice does. That proximity to the shoreline echoes Kate’s House on Santa Rosa Beach by Jennifer Bonner / MALL, another small coastal project built around similarly overlapping daily use.
On the second floor, a single large window is cut to frame only sky and sea, cropping out the street, the neighboring roofs, everything else the coast might show. It’s the one surface in the house that admits no mixing at all — a pause, held apart from a floor below where a restaurant, a home, and decades of pillars and beams are all doing their own thing at the same time.
House in Hayashisaki Matsue Beach by Akio Isshiki Architects | Location: 3-chōme-550-8 Hayashisakichō, Akashi, Hyogo 673-0033, Japan — Year: 2023 — Key materials: wood, handcrafted Awaji tile, red iron oxide plaster, cypress, natural stone