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Tatami Spaces

@tatamispaces.bsky.social
102 followers 98 following 677 posts

Japanese architecture and interior design. Tatami rooms, shoji screens, engawa verandas, tea houses. The details that make Japanese spaces feel different.

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Tatami Spaces @tatamispaces.bsky.social · 4h
Onyado Chikurintei sits inside Mifuneyama Rakuen in Saga prefecture, a 495,000 square meter property that holds only 11 guest rooms. Guests leave their shoes at a small entrance and step onto tatami, then follow window-lined hallways where the glazing pulls the surrounding forest indoors.
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Tatami Spaces @tatamispaces.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
Hotel Rakuragu fits 14 guest rooms onto an 84 sqm lot in Nihonbashi, boxed in by office blocks that share no height, width or material. #Architect
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Tatami Spaces @tatamispaces.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
Tokotsuku Architects turned an old wooden house in Sendai's Izumi ward into a 70.76 sqm public sauna. The renovation left the existing material as it was: gaps, stains, cold spots and dark corners allowed rather than patched, so aged boards meet new ones with no attempt to even the two out.
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Tatami Spaces @tatamispaces.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
Kengo Kuma's Bato Hiroshige Museum wears a screen of wooden louvers, an architectural translation of Hiroshige's rain drawn in lines. Twenty-five years after its 2000 completion the wooden louvers had deteriorated, and crowdfunding helped fund the restoration. #Architect
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Tatami Spaces @tatamispaces.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
Kirari's Hirabari branch in Nagoya is a meeting space for a firm that builds high-end exterior gardens, and the brief asked for a salon rather than a sales counter. #Architect
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Tatami Spaces @tatamispaces.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
FEDL buried almost all of this Tokyo house, completed in 2024. The site climbs 5m from the road and an apartment block looks down from the south, so to get the floor area the owners wanted, every room but the top floor went underground. #Architect
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Tatami Spaces @tatamispaces.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
Tsukumo Kiln is a ceramic studio on a hill in rural Kobe with no front and no back. Dept. and OAAA built it from three timber portal frames, each rotated 60 degrees from the last, which turns the 80.32-sqm plan into an equilateral triangle open to the fields and mountains in every direction.
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Tatami Spaces @tatamispaces.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
Kengo Kuma's Horai Onsen bath house runs along a cliff slope in Atami, above the Pacific. The site is long and thin, so the undressing area, washing area and bath were set out in one continuous line, and the entire floor is laid in Japanese cypress boards. #Architect
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Tatami Spaces @tatamispaces.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
Nasu, in Tochigi Prefecture, is known as a summer resort, and the approach to this house crosses fields and woodland before the site meets the forest edge. #Architect
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Tatami Spaces @tatamispaces.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
Koganeyu, a sento in Sumida, Tokyo, keeps the gap every Japanese bathhouse has: the wall between the men's and women's baths stops at 2250mm, short of the ceiling. #Architect
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Tatami Spaces @tatamispaces.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
Office Nomura-Sanko belongs to a local construction company near a nostalgic shopping street in Tokyo, and the company wanted neighbors to feel welcome. Ryo Kamamatsu of Note Architects found the answer inside the old building: 910-millimeter gaps that had been hallways and closets. #Architect
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Tatami Spaces @tatamispaces.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
The wooden grid on this building holds it up and holds the exhibits too. Kengo Kuma and Associates built the GC Prostho Museum Research Center by combining small wood members, each 6cm by 6cm, following the logic of a traditional wooden toy from the Hida Takayama region.
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Tatami Spaces @tatamispaces.bsky.social · 20/09/2026
Ishigaki City Hall used to sit in a tsunami inundation zone, so it was moved to higher ground. Kengo Kuma and Associates used the relocation to bring back a familiar Ishigaki view: layered red-tile stucco roofs set among dense greenery.
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Tatami Spaces @tatamispaces.bsky.social · 19/09/2026
The 2011 earthquake destroyed the railway station in Onagawa, Miyagi. Its replacement, designed by Shigeru Ban, reopened almost four years to the day later as the terminus of the line.
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Tatami Spaces @tatamispaces.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
Ryota Sekimoto of Riota Design rebuilt the main house of a pick-your-own farm in Kawagoe, Saitama, keeping it low under a koshiyane raised over the ridge. The proportions come from the farmhouses vanishing around it, so the new house reads as though it had always stood there.
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Tatami Spaces @tatamispaces.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
Tajimi in Gifu Prefecture is known for extreme summer heat, and Fumi Aso Architect & Associates shaped this single-story family house around it. The high ceiling and triangular roof are there to drive gravity ventilation.
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Tatami Spaces @tatamispaces.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
Pon Pon Yu is the only natural hot spring lodging in the Kushiro Marshland, and Kengo Kuma and Associates chose to renovate it rather than replace it. Outside, a thick oak façade stands up to the harsh marsh weather.
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Tatami Spaces @tatamispaces.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
Toilet 4 at the Osaka-Kansai Expo is a restroom and rest stop walled in printed soil. Akinori Hamada Architects designed it as a canyon, built only from materials available in Japan that can all return to nature.
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Tatami Spaces @tatamispaces.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
The house is 3.6 meters wide and 13.6 meters deep, and Nori Architects gave the size in the old module first: 2 ken by 7.5 ken. The site in Toyota City, Aichi runs long from east to west, with heavy traffic on the road to the west and neighbors pressed close on the north and south.
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Tatami Spaces @tatamispaces.bsky.social · 13/09/2026
There is no convenience store in Yamazoe, and that is the point. A sushi maker from Nara bought an old kominka in this Okuyamato mountain village and had OHArchitecture and Atelier Satoshi Takijiri Architects turn it into a hotel, completed in 2019.
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Tatami Spaces @tatamispaces.bsky.social · 12/09/2026
A real estate shop puts its postings up facing the road, and that usually leaves the room behind them dark. For Shonan Housing's 2020 office in Kanagawa, FEDL cut an open stairwell through the center of the steel-frame building, so the ground-floor shop doesn't feel boxed in.
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Tatami Spaces @tatamispaces.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
ETHICUS theleema is a renovated café in the holiday-home district of Izu Kogen, Shizuoka, that also has to work as a gallery for local potters and craft artists. Wataru Tanabe Studio had about 50 square meters for both.
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Tatami Spaces @tatamispaces.bsky.social · 08/09/2026
The second-floor ceiling starts at 1.68m and climbs to 2.63m as it reaches the southeast glass, so you walk toward the light without deciding to. The roof spreads out the same way.
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Tatami Spaces @tatamispaces.bsky.social · 07/09/2026
OUKA is a Showa-era house on the cherry-lined Daimon River in Inami, Toyama, renovated by Tomotsugu Yamakawa of Corare Artisan Japan into a two-bedroom stay. Masanori Oji chose what fills it: porcelain, brass, cedar, the lighting, the tableware.
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Tatami Spaces @tatamispaces.bsky.social · 06/09/2026
The ground floor of the Arc'teryx Tokyo Creation Center is a working sewing room, so Torafu Architects hung a cypress louvre ceiling above it. The slats soak up machine noise, which keeps a production floor quiet enough for the people at the circular fan-shaped cutting tables to concentrate.
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Tatami Spaces @tatamispaces.bsky.social · 05/09/2026
Takashi Okuno and Associates finished this tea house in Tadotsu in 2019, photographed by Shigeo Ogawa. The material list stops at natural wood and stone.
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Tatami Spaces @tatamispaces.bsky.social · 03/09/2026
ULTRA STUDIO built this Shibuya apartment from things you already see on the street: rough spray render, exposed concrete, the relief patterning of block walls and gates, and 45 nichō tile, Japan's most standard tile size. Each was pushed past its ordinary use.
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Tatami Spaces @tatamispaces.bsky.social · 02/09/2026
The entrance to Hotel Tou Nishinotoin Kyoto is a long narrow copper box. It opens onto a courtyard that runs through the center of the building. Suppose Design Office chose a quiet district of Buddhist altar shops rather than the crowded tourist center, and built the plan around depth.
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Tatami Spaces @tatamispaces.bsky.social · 01/09/2026
Kensuke Iso gave the inner garden exactly the same floor area as the living, dining and kitchen. One to one, treated as equals. The site in Oiso, Kanagawa had room to spread, so the house stays single storey and spends its edges on in-between space: engawa, deep eaves, a doma terrace.
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Tatami Spaces @tatamispaces.bsky.social · 31/08/2026
SUPPOSE DESIGN OFFICE took over a Roppongi space that had been a bar and, rather than gutting it, wrapped the room in washi. The paper is the work of Hatano Wataru. E and Y built the furniture, Filaments set the lighting plan, and L and L made the fixtures to it.
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Tatami Spaces @tatamispaces.bsky.social · 30/08/2026
Zenbo Seinei sits along a ridge on Awaji Island as a timber structure 90 meters long, carried by two steel columns that rise out of the greenery below it.
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Tatami Spaces @tatamispaces.bsky.social · 29/08/2026
Lightning struck Kamegaike Hot Springs and destroyed a large part of it.
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Tatami Spaces @tatamispaces.bsky.social · 28/08/2026
One in 10 people in Japan is now 80 or older. In Chiba prefecture, Kentaro Yamazaki built a community welfare center around a single long, narrow engawa that runs the length of the plan.
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Tatami Spaces @tatamispaces.bsky.social · 27/08/2026
KANEKA, an environmental technology company, wanted a wellness building for staff inside a patch of woods that survived in a big city. Kengo Kuma and Associates gave it a wooden frame and a green roof, then dropped the orthogonal grid so the plan lies on the ground like a leaf.
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Tatami Spaces @tatamispaces.bsky.social · 26/08/2026
Koganeyu is an 88 year old sento in Taihei, Sumida ward, Tokyo, and in 2020 its owners faced the usual choice of shutter or renovate. They asked the public instead, launching a crowdfunding campaign in May seeking 3 million yen, about 28,000 dollars, to pay for the work.
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Tatami Spaces @tatamispaces.bsky.social · 25/08/2026
A public bath occupies the lower three floors of a ten-storey apartment block in Nihonbashi Hamacho, Tokyo. Kubo Hideaki and Tsushima Yumi gave the half-open-air tub a double ceiling, the gap between the layers drawing air through so the room breathes like an outdoor bath in the middle of the city.
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Tatami Spaces @tatamispaces.bsky.social · 24/08/2026
The hall was built to be looked at from across a pond, not approached head on. Fujiwara no Yorimichi turned his father's Uji villa into a temple in 1052, and the Amida Hall was finished the year after, facing the Ajiike pond so worshippers on the east bank looked west toward the Pure Land.
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Tatami Spaces @tatamispaces.bsky.social · 23/08/2026
Pillars push straight through the slate roof, and metal birds perch where they come out. That is Terunobu Fujimori's first building, the 1991 Jinchokan Moriya Historical Museum in Nagano, clad in sawara cypress boards over earth-toned mortar mixed with straw.
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Tatami Spaces @tatamispaces.bsky.social · 22/08/2026
Pieces of solid Japanese larch, each 58mm thick, stack into a sphere four meters high with no metal fittings and no glue holding any of it together.
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Tatami Spaces @tatamispaces.bsky.social · 21/08/2026
A water pool sits in the middle of the courtyard, a raised stage above it so neighbours in Minato-ku can hold performances on temple ground.
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Tatami Spaces @tatamispaces.bsky.social · 20/08/2026
In Minami-ku, Nagoya, the outline of an old shopping street still reads on the ground, and the temple standing in it was rebuilt to work as a public room for the town.
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Tatami Spaces @tatamispaces.bsky.social · 19/08/2026
A three-ton boulder from a Karuizawa mountainside sits in the living room as the fireplace, giving a very large space a centre people gather around.
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Tatami Spaces @tatamispaces.bsky.social · 18/08/2026
Octagonal cedar posts stand in for the round columns of a Paris salon, under a marble ceiling and over a French herringbone floor. Fumihiko Sano Studio built the GEMMYO boutique in Shibuya as a frame within a frame, with columns and beams set inside the shell so the interior stands on its own.
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Tatami Spaces @tatamispaces.bsky.social · 17/08/2026
Ten years of work went into an arts complex designed by a man better known for his photographs. Hiroshi Sugimoto set up the Odawara Art Foundation in 2009 and then took the architect role himself at Enoura Observatory, about 60 miles southwest of Tokyo.
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Tatami Spaces @tatamispaces.bsky.social · 16/08/2026
The tile came from INAX, the textiles from Kawashima Selkon, the timber work from Nakamura Komuten. Japanese trades shipped to a hillside in Portland, Oregon.
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Tatami Spaces @tatamispaces.bsky.social · 15/08/2026
Laminated cedar louvers wrap the new reception hall at Kanjoin Temple, lined up straight along the top and stopping at different heights below, so the slats look like they float.
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Tatami Spaces @tatamispaces.bsky.social · 14/08/2026
The floor is tamped earth dug from the field out front, and the same soil went onto the exterior walls. Above it, 28 locally thinned logs fan out as a shell roof on two columns and a single ridge beam, curving up to catch the north-south wind.
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Tatami Spaces @tatamispaces.bsky.social · 13/08/2026
Masahiro Harada of Mt. Fuji Architects rebuilt a Nichiren Buddhist temple in Ikebukuro, one dating to the early Edo period, as a seven-story tower finished in June 2018. Copper blinds cover the whole facade, and each floor carries shoji screens and planters of trees and shrubs local to Kanto.
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Tatami Spaces @tatamispaces.bsky.social · 12/08/2026
Tenpekikyo is a restaurant on one floor of a Tokyo tenant building, 66 square meters, steel frame, second level. Masato Igarashi of IGArchitects did not split it into front of house and back, and instead ran a single continuous curved wall through the whole plan.
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Tatami Spaces @tatamispaces.bsky.social · 11/08/2026
Warakuen is a garden in Johana, Toyama, laid out by Hajime Yoshida with black concrete walls doing the work hedges usually do. A folly sits at the center of the site, and inside it a wall angled at 45 degrees turns visitors along the path instead of letting them take in everything at once.
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