Project Name: Ebara Apartment Complex

Location: Shinagawa, Tokyo, Japan

Design Team: Plus Maizumi Architect

Floor Area: 456.98 m²

Completion: February 2025

Photography: Masahide Iida / Ad Graphic

Design Features: In a narrow, irregularly shaped residential plot in Ebara, Shinagawa, Tokyo, architect Yosuke Maizumi of Plus Maizumi Architect has completed a compact twelve-unit rental apartment building that transforms one of urban housing's most persistent challenges, confined and lightless interiors, into a study of luminous spatial ingenuity.

The site, hemmed in by the dense grain of a traditional Tokyo neighbourhood, might easily have produced the kind of inward-looking, dim-corridored block that typifies speculative housing at this scale. Instead, the architect pursued a single disciplined ambition: to engineer pathways for light through every layer of the building, from the street facade to the most utilitarian corners of each unit.

The most inventive move occurs within the individual dwellings themselves. Despite restrained floor-to-ceiling heights, each unit incorporates a two-step internal level change, with the entrance positioned lower and the living space rising toward the window wall. This sectional device tilts the occupant's sightline upward toward the sky, making the room read as considerably taller than its actual dimensions. The curved soffit above the entrance reinforces this spatial generosity with a quietly elegant gesture.

At the facade, beams are inset to allow full slab-to-slab glazing along the street elevation, while corner openings dissolve the boundary between interior and city. Even the bathroom, storage, and wet areas receive borrowed light through openings that connect them to the main living space. The shared stairwell, typically a forgotten residual, is given large openings at every floor, threading daylight vertically through the building's core.

The result is a building that punches far above its compact footprint, a rigorous, light-led architecture that redefines what density can feel like.

Design Team: Founded in 2013 by Yosuke Maizumi, Plus Maizumi Architect is a Tokyo-based practice operating from the Shibuya district, registered as a first-class licensed architectural office under the Tokyo Metropolitan Government (Registration No. 60985). Principal Maizumi holds a Bachelor of Architecture from Tokyo University of Science (2006) and a Master's degree from Chiba University's Graduate School of Natural Science and Technology (2008), having previously built his professional foundation at Kurio Sogo Kikaku Jimusho before establishing the firm.

The practice works across residential, commercial, and interior typologies, consistently pursuing spatial clarity, material restraint, and a precise manipulation of light as its primary design language. This approach has earned the firm sustained critical recognition across Japan and internationally, including the Excellence Prize at the 51st Tokyo Architecture Award, the Excellence Prize at the 66th Kanagawa Architecture Competition, the German Design Award 2019 Excellence Prize, the JID Award 2024 Silver Prize, and the JCD Design Award 2018 Silver Prize for emerging practitioners. The firm has also received the Good Design Award and been selected for the Japan Space Design Award Best 100.

Maizumi additionally serves as a part-time lecturer at Komazawa Women's University, contributing to the next generation of architectural education in Japan.