Project Name: House in Amami Oshima

Location: Amami City, Kagoshima, Japan

Design Team: SAKAI ARCHITECTS  

Total Floor Area: 119.24 m²

Completion: 2024

Photography: Norihisa Ishii

Design Features: SAKAI ARCHITECTS director Kazunori Sakai has completed a radical off-grid family home on Amami Oshima, a subtropical island in Kagoshima Prefecture, that severs its connection to the public electricity grid entirely. Named House in Amami Oshima, the residence operates as a fully self-sustaining micro-infrastructure, powered exclusively by solar energy and conceived as a live-in laboratory for autonomous living. The project originated from Sakai’s purchase of a mountain plot three years prior, where he envisioned a self-reliant shelter capable of weathering both natural disasters and the social erosion caused by rapid rural depopulation. Rather than launching that experiment in the remote wilderness, he chose his own family home as the testing ground, making the decisive commitment to disconnect from the grid just ten days before the groundbreaking ceremony. The house responds directly to the island’s demanding climate, where intense humidity, powerful squalls, and counter-intuitively limited sunshine hours comparable to Japan’s Tohoku region all challenge conventional design assumptions. Sakai draws on the vernacular typology of separate-pavilion construction traditional to Amami, arranging five geometrically distinct volumes housing bathrooms, bedrooms, and storage around shared transitional zones that blur the boundaries between interior, exterior, family, and community. Deeply pitched roofs referencing the island’s elevated takakura granary structures channel four-directional ventilation and deflect fierce solar radiation, eliminating any need for air conditioning. Waste cycles close through on-site composting feeding a kitchen garden, while construction offcuts fuel a wood-burning sauna. The result is a quietly radical proposition: a home that questions the infrastructure dependency underpinning contemporary domestic life, and reframes dwelling as an act of ecological and cultural responsibility.

Design Team: Founded in 1979 by Atsumu Sakai in Kagoshima, Japan, SAKAI ARCHITECTS has spent over four decades building a regionally grounded practice rooted in the landscapes, climate, and cultural traditions of southern Japan. Incorporated as SAKAI ARCHITECTS Co., Ltd. in 2014, the firm is currently led by founding principal Atsumu Sakai and director Kazunori Sakai, who holds a Master of Architecture from the University of Florida’s Graduate School of Architecture and previously trained at the Tokyo-based Atelier TEKUTO. Operating from offices in both Amami City and Kagoshima City, the practice encompasses architectural design, interior design, renovation, landscape, and product design. The firm’s consistent design excellence has been recognised through numerous accolades, including two Good Design Awards (2014, 2018), multiple AIJ Kyushu Region Architecture Awards across consecutive years, and the Kagoshima City Scenery Design Award Grand Prize in 2018. Most recently, the practice received the AIJ Kyushu Region Architecture Award Newcomer Prize in 2024, the Fukuoka Beautiful Townscape Architecture Award in 2025, and the Kagoshima Wooden Residential Architecture Award Governor’s Prize in 2025. These recognitions collectively affirm the firm’s commitment to an architecture that is technically rigorous, environmentally responsive, and deeply embedded in the vernacular heritage of the Amami archipelago.