Location: Komae, Japan

Design Team: miCo.

Area: 88.42 m²

Year: 2025

Contractor: Fujii Komuten

Photography: Shun Fukuda

Design Features: Pet Hotel & Salon One² is a small two-storey timber pet hotel and grooming salon set along a metropolitan road in Komae, Tokyo. miCo. approached boarding as more than the efficient arrangement of cages. The project begins with an analogy to travel: just as owners encounter unfamiliar streets and scenes away from home, the dogs staying here should be offered a setting distinct from everyday life. Within 88.42 m², architecture is used to recalibrate how animals, staff and owners see one another.

The ground floor contains the shop, reception and grooming salon, linked visually by a series of brightly framed openings set into an otherwise white interior. Upstairs, the hotel provides three sizes of guest room for different dogs, each with its own window. Arranged in a continuous elevation, these rooms are read together. The intention was not to place a collection of miniature houses inside the building, but to construct the impression of a village landscape at the scale of the room.

That landscape is produced less by literal house forms than by two line weights printed and layered across the acrylic cage fronts. miCo. abstracted roofs, windows, lanes and neighbouring facades into parallel lines of differing thickness, direction and colour. At close range they dissolve into gradient-like patterns; from farther away, triangular roofs, square windows and rows of houses gradually become legible. The shift in recognition turns the transparent partitions into active surfaces that generate visual depth.

Saturated cyan, magenta, yellow, green and blue lines sit against a luminous white field, producing secondary colours and varying densities where they overlap. Dogs, rooms and more distant enclosures appear and recede between the stripes. The space remains transparent enough to be read across, yet its short circulation route acquires the layered character of a street. Framed openings on the ground floor extend the same language, blurring distinctions between window, door, display and viewing aperture.

The dark grey street elevation remains restrained, while the colourful One² graphic and bench at ground level introduce the interior system to the city. From outside to inside, the project turns a stay at a pet hotel into an experience of distance, recognition and memory. Each dog is given a room with its own scale and outlook; for its owner, glimpses of the animal moving behind the coloured layers become scenes to remember after the visit.

Design Team: miCo. was founded in Tokyo in 2008 by architect Mizuki Imamura and operates as a collective of independent designers from its office in Setagaya. Born in Kanagawa, Imamura graduated from the Department of Architecture at Meiji University in 1999 and worked with Kazuyo Sejima & Associates from 2001 to 2008. Alongside practice, she serves as a full-time lecturer at Kindai University.

The studio describes architecture as a collaborative undertaking made with everyone involved and as a means of living alongside the environment and the wider world. Rather than beginning with a fixed formal language, miCo. develops each project through the specific relationships among site, users and construction. Across houses, apartment buildings, commercial projects and educational spaces, boundaries, material and ways of seeing are used to give everyday activity a new spatial order.

Pet Hotel & Salon One² was led by Mizuki Imamura and Nobutaka Kawai. Born in Gifu, Kawai completed a master's degree in science and engineering at Keio University in 2019 and joined miCo. the same year. Recent recognition for the practice includes the top prize in the apartment category of the 50th Tokyo Architecture Award and a Good Design Best 100 selection in 2024, followed by an Architizer A+Awards Special Mention and a DFA Design for Asia Silver Award in 2025 for Kamakura Apartment.