Sakae House
Hikone, Japan
A new two storey timber house in Hikone, Shiga, finished in October 2020 for a couple with children, on the strip left when part of a row house was cut away and demolished: 7.5 metres wide and 30 deep, which the practice calls an eel's bed. Hearth Architects refused the obvious courtyard answer and instead joined a front garden and a rear garden with a narrow alley like garden along the south face, keeping the outside closed for privacy and bringing light in through skylights and high sidelights. Their own line is that they laid it out like a town rather than the inside of a house.
The practice publishes it in Japanese only, as Sakae no Ie, after the Sakae neighbourhood it stands in; Sakae House is the English rendering ArchDaily uses. Nakao Kenchiku Sekkeisha engineered the structure and Tsuda Corporation Shiga built it.
Hearth Architects
Hearth Architects is Yoshitaka Kuga, a first class registered architect who founded the practice in 2016 and works from Koka in Shiga Prefecture.
Architecture Hearth Architects (@hearth_architects). Photography Yuta Yamada (@yuta.yamada_). Seen via @architecturelab.
The picture comes from this post on Instagram.
Researched August 2026. I credit each piece as carefully as I can; if you know more about this one, message me on Instagram.