Project Name: House of Birds (torinoie)

Location: Western Japan

Design Team: Yumiko Tokuno Architecture Office

Floor Area: 94.26 m²

Completion: December 2025

Photography: Suzuki Ken’ichi, Yumiko Tokuno

Design Features: Tucked into a narrow residential plot in western Japan, the House of Birds by Yumiko Tokuno Architecture Office challenges the conventional anxieties surrounding compact urban living. Measuring just 4.3 metres wide and 14.3 metres deep, the site is hemmed in on three sides by neighbouring buildings — yet the architect has responded not with compromise, but with quiet invention.

The project was born from an unusually optimistic client brief. When the owners approached Yumiko Tokuno, they asked explicitly for a small house, embracing the constraints of their land rather than lamenting them. This spirit of acceptance became the generative force behind the design, which sets out to create what the architect calls “margins for discovery” — spatial ambiguity that invites inhabitants to find their own place within the home over time, rather than prescribing where life must happen.

The house is organised across three storeys, with a deliberate material and experiential contrast between the lower two floors and the third. At the top, a pitched roof generates a dynamic ceiling that rises and falls, while carefully positioned openings draw in light and cast shifting shadows that animate the interior with the movement of the sun. A full-width sliding partition on this level allows the floor plate to transform between one open room, two distinct spaces, or three — offering flexibility that evolves with the family.

Throughout all three levels, small terrace gardens are woven into the section, dissolving the boundary between interior and exterior. Glimpsed through openings of varying scale, the surrounding neighbourhood, the changing seasons, and the passage of each day all become part of the domestic experience. The result is a house that does not merely shelter its occupants, but grows alongside them.

Design Team: Founded in 2019 by architect Yumiko Tokuno, Yumiko Tokuno Architecture Office is a Tokyo-based practice operating across architecture, interior design, furniture, product design, and urban development. Under Tokuno’s leadership, the office approaches each commission through a process of collaborative inquiry, drawing on a broad network of specialists across disciplines to build layered, rigorously considered design responses.

Tokuno holds a graduate degree from the Yokohama National University Graduate School of Architecture and Urban Design Y-GSA, and refined her practice over nearly a decade at the office of Ryue Nishizawa before establishing her own firm. Her academic presence extends across several institutions, where she serves as a part-time lecturer, contributing to the formation of the next generation of architects in Japan.

The office pursues work at every scale, from residential interventions on constrained urban sites to broader questions of place-making and landscape. Central to its design philosophy is a commitment to creating environments that are generous, luminous, and spatially open — spaces that do not predetermine how life unfolds within them, but instead cultivate the conditions for discovery, growth, and beauty. The practice currently operates from its studio in Koto-ku, Tokyo.