Open plan living amid the vibrant landscape of the Seto Inland Sea

This house is built on a site that is located a short distance away from a residential area that extends across the Uomiyama mountains west of Kure City in Hiroshima Prefecture.
A magnificent view of the Seto Inland Sea awaits you once you make your way past the windbreak from this site. While our priority was to design a house that takes advantage of the qualities of its excellent environment, most of the site had a cross-sectional shape that was as steep as a cliff. Therefore, we had to plan the project by making use of the small remaining area with a gentle gradient.
In order to minimize the amount of excavation required, we designed the building layout according to the shape of the area with a gentle gradient and the differences in elevation. The result was a “skip-floor layout” with the entrance on 1F serving as the main point of reference. The bedroom was placed a half-floor below the ground floor on 0.5F, the children’s room a half-floor above on 1.5F, and the living/dining/kitchen area and the bathroom a further half-floor above on 2F, which offers the best view of the surroundings. The spaces created as a result of the differences in elevation at the site allowed us to manipulate the arrangement and size of the various openings in the house to integrate a variety of different views of the surroundings into the everyday life in this house, such as the unobstructed view of Kure City from the living room, the picturesque view at dusk from the kitchen, and the view that peeks through the foliage from the children’s room. The balcony on 2.5F, a half-floor above the living room, offers a panoramic view of the Seto Inland Sea, where one can enjoy watching the fireworks launched from the sea in the summer. We hope that this building will not only enjoy the richness of its surrounding environment through the spaces we have created by making use of the shape of the site, but will also blend in seamlessly with the ever-evolving nature through its architectural style that has been topographically optimized.