New Town Houses in Tokyo

Heute mal was in englischer Sprache :-)

Nakai is part of Tokyo's Shinjuku ward, one of the major hubs in the city. Even though being just a ten minute train-ride away from the center of business activity in Tokyo, it still manages to preserve a rather human-scale building structure, mainly dominated by detached single family houses (zoning and building restrictions might play a role in this game). Typically, these are 2-3 level high wooden houses, newer ones pre-fabricated “plastic homes”, some modern concrete blocks, all close to the street and rarely including gardens.

Walking though the neighborhood’s winding streets these days, it is easy to notice that things are changing. New developments start every day, one “old” house – something like 30 years is considered “old” in Tokyo - is replaced by a handful of new ones. Building plots with a size of 300 or 400sqm are populated by as many as six new houses, including ground level parking.




Try to zoom-in and use the aerial-picture to experience what I mean.

Normally, everywhere in Tokyo and Japan, single family houses are nothing to become excited about. IMHO, most of them are really boring. No money seems to be spent on façade design - all houses look similar, especially as they all inherit one of maybe ten basic facade designs available amongst money-focused housing developers. (hey, everybody carries around the very same ipod, wears the same sneakers and handbags, so why not live in identical-looking houses, who cares?).

Typical examples of contemporary single-family houses Tokyo/Japan-Style:






From time to time, better and more interesting projects can be found in Tokyo. One of them is for sure the New Town-Houses Project in Nakai (the official title is “Court Décor Yonnosaka”). The site is a fair five minutes’ walk away from Nakai Seibu-Shinjuku-Commuter-Line Station, and seven minutes to the nearest subway station. The size of the site is just over 2,100 square meters, (0.2 hectares), nevertheless does the master plan schedule as many as 28 houses to be realized here!


The design of local mastermind architect Itsuko Hasegawa was chosen out of a design competition. The “New Town Houses” – whatever the advertisement slogan wants to tell us by this, are somehow connected to each other, somehow not connected, and some houses have up to six direct neighbors (and you thought two neighbors are already tough…).


The overall layout and elevation tributes to the slope-alike site, and make it look like a terrace. All houses feature a roof terrace, and are laid out over three levels (5x5m-ground-floor plus several annexes, mainly 2LDK & 3LDK, sized between 73 and 117 sqm). The new homes seem to pay tribute to the aging society, as they are all equipped with a small personal elevator.






Constructed out of concrete, the closely arranged building cubes will create many shaded spots, something essential for the hot and humid Tokyo climate. In addition to the 28 buildings, a “cultur room” is shared by the future inhabitants, included in a monthly fee for facility management (between 18.700 and 30.000 Yen, relative to the floor size).

The development is advertised as ecological community. All homes are equipped with a Japanese system called Ecocute (a high efficiency heat pump water heater using a natural refrigerant (CO2)). Another important fact is that some trees located on the site had to be preserved and had to be included in the overall design.

It looks like every unit will use its very own air conditioning, and gas has been abandoned from use in the kitchen in favor of electrical ovens. Even though the roofs could easily deal with some panels, I cannot find any clues for solar energy use. Taking a look inside the building, everything is nicely arranged around last-century air-condition machines.

The elevated wall towards the street, a result caused by the underground (street level) parking, really puts out the question why these buildings are called town houses. Isn’t it the direct interaction with the (public) street that makes up the main character of a classical Town House, along with the terraced layout? Frankly speaking, this set of houses looks more like a closed service complex for elderly people. One entrance on the left, one on the right, the only interaction with the street is the entrance to the parking floor. Welcome to the new private-city (I should mention that it is highly unpopular with the Japanese people to live on ground floor, for whatever reasons, they feel it is unsafe.). The “Culture Room” might be a nice idea, though it will probably be empty during five days a week.

Personally, I have to admit that the idea and the overall design looks interesting, especially in a rather unspectacular housing-surrounding like Tokyo. Fitting 28 houses on 2,100 square meters is something very “tokyoesque”, a design with 22 or 24 houses would have been even more appealing to me. But maybe this is where the development company comes in and asks for the bit of extra profit to make out of the site. A 102.12 square meter Town House will sell for 129,000,000 Yen, approx. 750,000 Euro equiv., so there is a reasonable explanation for squeezing some more cubes in.


A great thing is the consequent use of the roof as accessible green terrace, especially in a place like Tokyo (btw, schools have been utilizing the roof as playground area for ages already, it’s about time other buildings learn their lesson from it). Sadly, for the site does not make any efforts to form a (semi-)public outdoor space to meet and rest, talking from one roof terrace to the other might turn out as a new way of communicating.

There are no information available about the estimated, anticipated energy consumption of the buildings, and no information about state-of-the-art insulation techniques (as far as I can understand the Japanese explanations). This is what I would be interested in, especially with the eco-movement being in full bloom at the moment.

It seem quite a generous waste of space to layout the structure over three levels and adding both stairways and an elevator to every single cube (and the stairways are far to narrow as if they could be considered of living space in any kind). So I would be curious about how much percentage of the overall development is devoted to the inner access of the buildings.



After all, I am looking forward to visit this project again from time to time just to see how it will develop. For I am sure this development and architect Hasegawa-Sama will receive great honors, respect and a good reputation.

* All project images are snapshots taken from http://www.yonnosaka.com. Please visit this webpage for information about copyrights and further usage.