Location: Awaji, Japan

Design Team: ooc

Area: 130.41 m²

Year: 2024

Photography: Atsushi Nakata

Design Features: Ubusuna stands in the rural landscape of Awaji Island, Japan. Designed by ooc, it converts an approximately eighty-year-old house into a private rental retreat. The property contained two timber structures: a 1948 building assembled through traditional methods and a later addition built with conventional post-and-beam construction. Although both are timber, they respond differently to seismic forces. Instead of concealing this discrepancy beneath a cosmetic renovation, the architects made structural reconciliation the clearest order of the new interior.

A tubular load-bearing wall runs north to south through the centre of both buildings and ties their previously separate frames together. Its curved surface forms a continuous passage after the entrance, alternately narrowing the view and opening toward the courtyard, dining area and guestrooms. Visitors enter beneath the dark charred-cedar facade and move inward across stone floors. Existing roof frames, inserted columns and the new wall are allowed to register as parts of one unfolding sequence rather than competing displays of old and new.

Accommodation is organised on either side of this structural axis. A round table and low pendant establish the dining room as a shared centre, while the guestrooms retain exposed timber and a more intimate bodily scale. Openings bring garden planting, morning light and rain close to the interior. Suwa teppei stone underfoot and finely plastered walls and vaults shift the tactile register from firm and rough to soft. Once occupied, the structural concept becomes an everyday route between bed, table, bath and courtyard.

The renovation retains tiled roofs, timber posts and existing openings wherever possible, while new foundations, columns, beams and continuous load-bearing surfaces provide reinforcement. Charred cedar, stone, plaster and exposed wood are not blended into a single nostalgic language; each keeps a distinct sense of age. Daylight enters deep into the plan through the garden and axial openings. At night, the entrance and corridor become the brightest spatial lines as the low roofs recede into Awaji's dark fields.

Ubusuna matters not simply because an old house survives, but because its renewal can be understood through occupation. Guests cross thresholds created by the structural intervention, share meals and spend a night between two timber traditions. Seismic integration is translated into a travel experience: through slow movement and repeated use, the visitor reads how a rural dwelling has been extended, aged and inhabited again, encountering the continuity of Awaji's local building culture at human scale.

Design Team: ooc was founded in 2022 by architect Takuma Hashimoto and works between Tokyo and Awaji Island. Born on Awaji in 1993, Hashimoto studied at the University of Hyogo, Kyoto Institute of Technology, TU Wien and the doctoral programme at the University of Tokyo. He later worked at nendo and has taught part-time at the University of Hyogo since 2023.

The practice moves across planning, spatial design and operation, using each project to test how creative work can transform an existing environment. Its approach is not tied to one building type. It is particularly attentive to structures, materials and traces of time already present in older buildings, introducing measured interventions that support new patterns of use. From rural renovations on Awaji to workplaces and commercial interiors in Tokyo, ooc searches for continuity between architecture, interiors, furniture and the life that follows completion.