Location: Nishinomiya, Japan

Design Team: FUMIASO ARCHITECT & ASSOCIATES

Area: 15.11 m² (including 7.06 m² of new construction)

Year: 2024

Photography: Hisasuke Otake

Design Features:Yuiichimi Processing Facility and Shop occupies part of an existing house in Nishinomiya, Hyogo, where FUMIASO ARCHITECT & ASSOCIATES created a small place for processing and selling chilli products. Rather than turning the whole residence into retail space, the project gives a family-run product a distinct public threshold within a timber house that is around two decades old.

The project grew out of a chilli field in Karatsu, Saga, cultivated by the client’s grandmother. As responsibility for the field began to pass to a new generation, the client sought a way to share its flavour beyond gifts to friends and restaurants. At the same time, the family house in Nishinomiya was becoming less continuously occupied, allowing production, retail and domestic life to be recalibrated within one building.

The existing entrance remains part of the domestic and back-of-house circulation, while the shop is approached from the former south-facing terrace. Its steel frame was removed, leaving the concrete plinth in place. A small timber addition now sits on that base, retaining the legible interval between the old structure and the new work rather than replacing the site wholesale.

Attached beside the weathered timber cladding, the addition follows the planting and irregularities of the original facade. Its dark, faceted presence reads as a deliberately sharp object against the softer wooden house; from the street it appears to hover just above the ground. The gesture translates the role of chilli in a dish into architecture: small in scale, but unmistakable in character.

The shop measures 15.11 square metres, including 7.06 square metres of new construction. Inside, continuous display surfaces, windows and timber joinery shape a compact sequence for browsing and exchange. Yuiichimi does not rely on size for impact. Like a small crystallised fragment, the addition reconnects an older house with family labour, a product’s lineage and the everyday life of the neighbourhood.

Design Team:Founded in Kobe in 2006 by architect Fumi Aso, FUMIASO ARCHITECT & ASSOCIATES works across houses, commercial interiors, hospitality, landscape and product-related design. Aso studied architecture at Kanazawa Institute of Technology and its graduate school, then worked at Ryuji Koyama Architectural Laboratory from 2002 to 2006 before establishing the practice.

The studio treats the history of a site, the client’s memories and the expectations of future users as a shared starting point. Its work looks beyond the isolated building to connect architecture with interiors, landscape, public activity and community collaboration. This balance of conceptual clarity and lived experience allows Yuiichimi to grow from a family story into a compact street-side place with a precise identity.

Aso is currently a professor at Wakayama University and has taught at Mukogawa Women’s University and Setsunan University. The practice has received the Kansai Emerging Architect Award, the Watanabe Setsu Award at the Osaka Architecture Competition, and an Excellence Award from the Japan Federation of Architects & Building Engineers Associations; in 2024, Aso was selected for Architects of the Year by the Architectural Institute of Japan Design Association.