Project Name: House M

Location: Tokyo, Japan

Design Team: KAMIJIMA Architects

Area: 112.62 m² (GFA)

Year: 2025

Photography: Keishin Horikoshi / SS Tokyo

Design Features: KAMIJIMA Architects has completed House M, a residential rebuild located in a scenic preservation district of Tokyo for a client who works in horticulture. The project transforms a private dwelling into a measured threshold between domestic life and the surrounding neighbourhood. Its conceptual point of departure is a straightforward observation: the rare and unusual plants cultivated in the client's previous garden had long served as catalysts for informal exchange with local passersby.

Principal architect Naoki Kamijima extended this social logic into the spatial organisation of the new building, arranging the plan as a carefully calibrated gradient from public to private. A projecting eave establishes a sheltered zone at the building's edge, providing space for impromptu conversation with neighbours. An earthen-floor entrance hall — a contemporary reinterpretation of the traditional Japanese doma — draws visitors incrementally inward. The private living quarters beyond remain fully reserved for the inhabitants. The sequence deliberately avoids categorical boundary-making, proposing instead that a house can sustain communal exchange and domestic privacy simultaneously, each given its appropriate degree of distance.

Structurally, the building is a two-storey timber-framed volume set well back from all four site boundaries — a direct response to the strict planning controls governing scenic preservation zones. Its defining formal element is a steeply pitched gable roof at a seven-tenths gradient, oriented with the gable end facing the street. The form introduces generous intervals of space and natural light between the house and adjacent properties, while establishing a quietly legible silhouette within the streetscape.

At the time of completion, planting remains intentionally restrained — trees carried over from the previous house, a limited number of new specimens, and a temporary gravel bed. Kamijima envisions the building's true resolution arriving gradually, as the client — working in horticulture — accumulates plantings over time. When vegetation eventually fills the margins created by the plan and the roof form, the gable will read not as a pristine architectural object but as a structure that has genuinely grown into its place.

Design Team: Founded in 2021 and based in Shibuya, Tokyo, KAMIJIMA Architects is a licensed architectural practice led by principal architect Naoki Kamijima. Holding a Master's degree in Architecture and Urban Environment from Chiba Institute of Technology (2012), Kamijima brings nearly a decade of professional experience accumulated at NIIZEKI STUDIO, where he contributed to a diverse portfolio spanning corporate headquarters, hospitality, residential, and retail typologies.

The studio operates across architectural design, interior design, renovation, and furniture and product design, offering comprehensive services from initial programming and schematic design through construction administration. Its practice is grounded in a commitment to honesty toward all conditions surrounding a project — context, environment, and client — and the belief that each design proposal should surface an insight that lies outside the client's initial imagination. The studio pursues spatial outcomes that, when experienced, register with quiet immediacy and clarity.

In parallel with practice, Kamijima has served as a part-time lecturer at Chiba Institute of Technology since 2024, contributing to the academic discourse on architectural design. The studio is registered with the Tokyo Metropolitan Government as a first-class architectural firm (Registration No. 64432).