Project Name: Azumigawa House

Location: Takashima City, Shiga Prefecture, Japan

Architecture Practice: atelier umi

Total Floor Area: 92.72 m²

Completion: April 2025

Photography: Kaide Shotaro

Design Features: The Azumigawa House stands within the Biwako Quasi-National Park in Takashima City, Shiga Prefecture, Japan, making it one of the most quietly compelling residential projects to emerge from the Kansai region in recent years. Designed by principal architect Fujita Tokihiko of atelier umi, the single-storey timber residence occupies a generous plot of over 1,200 square metres, and translates the client's foundational ambition, to live inside a forest, into a precise and restrained spatial order.

The plan is organised around a staggered formation of rooms, each offset from the next so that the sequence of spaces progresses incrementally from communal to private. Moving inward from the entrance, deliberate sight lines and shifting spatial depths replicate the directional and layered perception of walking through woodland. The project's most distinctive formal gesture is the continuous variation of ceiling heights combined with softly curved forms that run throughout the interior, evoking the sensation of moving beneath a forest canopy, and lending the building a tectonic rhythm that feels at once organic and rigorously considered.

The sunken pit living area, set one step below the chestnut timber floor and laid with carpet, cultivates a quality of unhurried domesticity. Shoji screens facing the garden have their mullions refined to the absolute minimum, allowing diffused natural light to become the dominant sensory register of the interior. The dining kitchen is anchored by a large, corner-softened table, a functional and symbolic centrepiece for a household whose livelihood is rooted in food. As planting on the site continues to mature, the architects anticipate that architecture and landscape will gradually merge, until the house becomes, in the fullest sense, a dwelling inside a forest.

Design Team: atelier umi was formally established in 2014 under the name TODs. by architect Fujita Tokihiko, and rebranded under its current name in 2021. The practice is registered in Takashima City, Shiga Prefecture, Japan. Fujita studied at the Kyoto College of Architecture, completing both the undergraduate programme and its advanced course before spending eight years at a design office in Nara, where he developed a rigorous grounding in construction detailing and regional building culture.

The practice is led independently by principal architect Fujita Tokihiko, a licensed first-class architect (Registration No. 347153). Its scope of work spans residential, villa, commercial, office, and hospitality typologies, and extends into interior design, renovation, product and furniture design, exhibition and installation design, and landscape planning, with no geographical restriction on commissions.

The practice's work has been recognised by leading Japanese architectural publications including architecturephoto, Modern Living, LiVES, and TECTURE MAG. The core design philosophy of atelier umi rests on three convictions: a careful reading of the client's intentions alongside the atmospheric qualities of the site; a deep respect for the knowledge embedded in craft and material; and a sustained commitment to producing spaces that accumulate emotional resonance over time, spaces capable of touching the sensibility of those who inhabit them in the quiet, unguarded moments of everyday life.