Each room of the timber-framed home is lined with plywood. Left unstained, the plywood covers every wall, floor, and ceiling and makes the house look almost like a construction job left undone. The house, located in Kyoto, is also largely empty. Its sparsely furnished look emphasizes the ‘incompleteness’ of the dwelling.
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Although Ephemeral House looks dramatically different than a traditional Japanese home at first glance, it does possess some familiar features. Sliding dividers can be expanded to create individual rooms, or left retracted for a more open floor plan. Closing the sliding partitions creates smaller rooms, offering some privacy and coziness in this otherwise stark space. A solid staircase rises through the center of the structure and is perhaps the only surface not lined with untreated plywood.
Architects Yoichiro Hayashi and Shogo Sakurai designed the home with this ‘unfinished’ aesthetic at the request of their young their client, who wanted a temporary place for living—and nothing more.
He could have just moved to Detroit.
+ NAAD
Via Dezeen
Images via Keishiro Yamada for NAAD.
