House in Kitamachi
This is a project to renovate an old house in Nara City. Various buildings of different ages stand on the site, sharing a corridor and a courtyard. The oldest and largest of them is a barn with a large atrium, built to store long logs. The barn had been little used for many years and had become weathered. The client wanted to renovate it into a comfortable living space.We removed a large amount of mud walls that had detached from the bamboo framework due to continuous leaks, rebuilt the basement, reinforced columns and beams that had been weakened by termite and decay damage, and filled the roof and walls with insulation.The atrium, converted into a large living room, leads to a Japanese-style room, bedroom, sanitary room, cat room, and closet. A steel stair leads to the bedrooms on the second floor, and the perimeter of the atrium is a corridor with structural reinforcement.
