Location: Nikko, Japan

Architect: Atelier MEME

Gross Floor Area: 145.75 m²

Year: 2025

Design Team: Atsuyuki Yagi, Jiaxin Li, Keita Yanagisawa

Structural Design: Ai Tamura Structural Design Studio

Contractor: Ikeda Komuten

Photography: Blue Hours / Hiroyuki Oki

Design Features: House in Nikko stands in Tochigi Prefecture, surrounded by mountains including Mount Nantai. Its clients, a couple with three children, asked for a retreat from the pace of everyday life. Atelier MEME avoids the familiar image of a house and instead imagines the building as a rocky outcrop that has long belonged to the landscape: low and weighty, yet animated from within by fissures of light.

With neighbouring homes close by, the whole building is set diagonally across the plot to avoid direct confrontation. Cubic volumes of different sizes are staggered along a spiral plan, ranging from roughly 3,600 mm square to 900 mm square. Bedrooms, wet rooms and storage occupy these solids; the spaces left between them become dining room, living room and corridors, joined into a cave-like sequence whose destination is never visible all at once.

Ceiling height changes as the spiral unfolds. Lower, more intimate spaces at the perimeter gradually rise through the dining area towards the living room at the centre, turning movement into a succession of compression, deflection and release. Each private room has two layers: a larger room entered from the corridor and a smaller chamber beyond. Their uses are deliberately open, allowing the family to appropriate them as patterns of study, rest and storage evolve.

Openings are carefully placed in the gaps between volumes. Small windows protect privacy while framing sky, garden and the changing angle of daylight. At the end of the living room, a larger aperture appears as if part of the rock mass has fallen away, gathering light at the conclusion of the spatial sequence. Openness is produced not through expanses of glass, but through the width, depth and orientation of each fissure.

The many volumes create demanding roof junctions for a timber structure. A rapid-curing urethane waterproofing system preserves formal freedom while addressing durability. Fine aggregate is added to the waterproofing of the box gutters so that it visually merges with the granular Jolypate exterior, allowing walls, roofs and drainage to remain part of one rocky figure. The result balances a solid exterior with softly lit interiors, enclosing family life while leaving room for it to change.

Design Team: Atelier MEME began as Atsuyuki Yagi's architectural practice in 2013 and was incorporated under its current name in 2017. Based in Shinjuku, Tokyo, the studio is led by Yagi, who was born in Sapporo in 1980 and raised in Fukuoka. He graduated from the University of Tokyo's Department of Architecture, practised in China, and joined Atsushi Kitagawara Architects in 2006, contributing to projects including the Japan Pavilion at Expo Milano.

The practice works across architecture, interiors, landscape, furniture and urban-development consultancy, with related activity in research and education. Its guiding phrase, 'Softening architecture, opening society', frames architecture as a means of easing the hard edges of the built environment while supporting perception, human connection and children's emotional development.

Atelier MEME also treats architecture as a form of cultural and spatial capital, pursuing regional character and lasting value beyond efficiency or precedent. House in Nikko was designed by Atsuyuki Yagi with Jiaxin Li and Keita Yanagisawa. Its timber structure, spiral plan and rooms left open to future appropriation extend the studio's interest in soft boundaries, human scale and spatial narrative.