Layered With Meaning

Jun Igarashi, a 38-year-old architect who hails from Hokkaido, has coined the phrase “buffer boxes” to describe how some of his designs abstractly capture the layered properties of traditional Japanese houses. “In former days, we connected the inside and outside with a veranda,” Igarashi says. “Unraveling the nature of those in-between spaces gives me a hint of how to make a completely novel kind of architectural space.” His most recent project, Layered House, turns that concept inward.

Though the 2,177-square-foot, two-story house—owned by Igarashi’s oldest school friend, Mikiya Fujiwara—appears from the outside to be a simple rectangle, it is subtly complex within. Three buffer zones, defined by a sequence of expanding apertures, separate the living room from the garden. While the introverted plan shrouds Fujiwara, his wife, Mika, and their two children, Kouya and Kyoko, in privacy, the phased transition between the outside world and the family’s interior life is gentle and relaxing. Even from its deepest recesses, the home celebrates its link to the natural world. “The organization of layers produces a soft kind of light that seems to sprawl endlessly on the far side of the garden,” Igarashi says, “while the way it scatters inside makes for a perfect condition in which light and shadow live together.”

In cross section, each floor leading into the house rises 14 inches above the last. Step by step, the structure climbs away from the six-foot-wide terrace toward a shallow sunroom and then a study, finally leveling out in the main space. Aside from demarcating these largely open areas, the steps provide three temperature zones and prevent cold drafts from entering the living room. “When you are in the back of the living room, you have a sense of equilibrium,” Fujiwara says of the effect. “Mov­ing a little toward the garden, it feels like you are approaching the entrance of a forest.”

Igarashi is quick to point out that closing the three semitransparent white organdy curtains only adds to the drama. “By cutting off the scenery, you become much more conscious of the scenery,” the architect says. “It limits vision but creates an awareness.” But it is Fujiwara who puts it most poetical­ly: “With the curtains closed, you are wandering through the mist.”