Villa in Saitama
The two-story single-family house stands on a “flagpole lot”, a site with an alleyway that connects it to the street. This is the result of the subdivision of a larger lot in order to sell it at an affordable price, typical seen in the dense suburbs of Tokyo. As the main area of the site does not face the street, all four sides were surrounded by close by buildings. Arii Irie Architects proposed a plan based on a 7.2-meter square rotated 45 degrees from the site. The angled footprint provides sunlight to enter the ground floor between the gaps of the adjacent houses, and at the same time gains distance from its surroundings. The simple zoning of the house consists of an open-plan ground floor, with bedrooms and a bathroom/terrace on the second floor. The main axis of the plan rotates from ground floor to second, providing small bedrooms for the three children, with partitions that can be removed in the future to create an additional living space on the first floor. The idea was the realization of a “Villa” in a typical residential context, not completely isolated from its surroundings, but an autonomous space within the dense suburbia, achieved with the help of geometry.
