This house was built in line with the concept of living with books, and features a bookcase as its center. As a journalist, the client wanted to ensure there was sufficient space to keep a large number of books and also that they had the space to spend time looking at them.

All of the spaces within the house face a bookcase with a width of 7 m, height of 7 m, and a depth of 60cm. The bookcase stands at the center of the house, meaning everyone in the family has access to and can share it. Integrated into the wooden frame of the structure, the central bookcase plays a dual role in both supporting the load of the books and also as a bearing wall. Apart from keeping books, it also functions as a shoe rack in the entrance, a storage space for towels and underwear in the utility room, a wardrobe in the bedroom, and a cupboard in the kitchen. The spaces can either be gradually connected or divided by deciding whether or not you want to put things on a shelf, what you would like to put there, and how to arrange them. The small and large un-rectangular spaces that can be created by leaning the bookcase 2.5 degrees to the south have been designed based on functionally necessary dimensions, and can be used practically while at the same time providing some characters of front/back and open/closed within the space. Having the case leaning at this angle makes it easy to remove and replace books from the ladder. There is no clear demarcation of the shelves for individual family members, with all of them living in the house and circulating in the areas around the bookcase in the middle. This design is “furniture looking like a building as well as a building looking like furniture.”

The pair of bearing walls along the land boundary are column walls composed of 105 mm x 105 mm columns connected with splines. The black painted walls stand in contrast to the wooden color of the bookcase. The structural materials serve as the finished interior and also play the role of heat and sound insulator, in addition to controlling humidity. In fact, they are so effective that one small heater is sufficient even during the severe Hokuriku region winter. The sport-loving children practice football and baseball using these walls and climb them like in rock climbing. The black painted column walls exude “dignity.”

These two structural features within the house have the potential to increase our familiarity with the structural components that we have always kept a distance from.