Location: Karuizawa, Nagano, Japan

Design Team: KAMIYA ARCHITECTS

Area: 380.41 m²

Year: 2023

Photography: Takumi Ota, Nanako Ono

Design Features: Set in Karuizawa, Nagano, THE CONE is a shared villa designed by Shuhei Kamiya and KAMIYA ARCHITECTS to occupy the territory between a private home and a hotel. Its challenge is not limited to a steep forested site; it also concerns a particular duration of inhabitation. Guests do not remain indefinitely, yet each stay needs enough domestic continuity, privacy and belonging to feel complete. Rather than reducing the retreat to a framed view, the building uses a single arc to choreograph gathering, solitude and shared life.

Most of the site falls away sharply, leaving a fan-shaped plateau edged by existing stonework. The plan takes a segment of a circle, while a mono-pitched section rotates along the curve to produce an inverted-conical roof. This precise geometry gathers the entrance, water garden and rising ground to one side, then opens continuously toward the southern woods and Mount Hanare. The interior is never grasped at once; the landscape appears in changing distances and proportions as the curved corridor unfolds.

The central question of shared living is less the number of rooms than the changing distance between collective and private life. An arcing corridor acts as an interior street, linking entrance, kitchen, dining and living areas with a playroom, bedrooms, studies and bathing spaces. Large and small rooms alternate along the route. Curved walls briefly contain the view before glazing releases it into the trees, allowing groups to disperse without losing their connection to the communal centre.

The living and dining room spans 15 by 12 metres toward the forest. Although legally classified as timber construction, its beams are reinforced with steel and conventional timber posts give way to slender solid-steel columns, limiting structural interruption across the panorama. Overhead, the white curved ceiling works as an immense reflector, receiving daylight and diffusing indirect illumination after dark. The roof therefore becomes more than an emblematic outline; it regulates light, scale and emotional tone from within.

At the centre of this expansive room, a three-tonne andesite boulder found in the mountains of Karuizawa is hollowed into an open fireplace. Its weight and uncontrollable texture interrupt the purity of the geometry while giving shared life a natural point of gravity. Local Shiga stone, Nagano cedar, the water garden, terrace and southern woodland bring material and seasonal change into daily experience. Around the fire people gather; along the corridor they separate, allowing the villa to hold the comfort of a hotel and the intimacy of a home.

THE CONE ultimately addresses the possibility of return rather than the fantasy of a single escape. Every room shares the same forest but receives it differently; the fireplace anchors collective memory, while the corridor and private rooms accommodate individual rhythms. For a villa inhabited by changing groups, its most significant achievement is a form of belonging that does not depend on permanent possession, giving even a brief stay the layered familiarity of coming home.

Design Team: KAMIYA ARCHITECTS was founded in Tokyo in 2017 by architect Shuhei Kamiya. Born in Toyohashi, Aichi, Kamiya completed both his bachelor's and master's degrees in architecture at Waseda University. From 2007 to 2016 he worked at Kengo Kuma and Associates on projects in Japan and abroad, before moving to Denmark to research Nordic design and folklore and joining BIG as a senior architect, where he led international competitions and major projects in Asia.

The practice works across architecture, interiors, landscape, furniture and product design, as well as branding and creative direction. It approaches architecture as a way of redefining relationships between people and place, combining respect for tradition, nature and craftsmanship with clear concepts, expressive form and carefully developed details. Based in Kita-Aoyama and led by Kamiya, the studio has received honours including the Architectural Institute of Japan Young Architect Award, KUKAN DESIGN AWARD Gold, iF Design Award and Good Design Award; THE CONE received Gold in the House category at the FRAME Awards 2025.