🇯🇵Japan·Private home, not open to visitors

Kidosaki House (城戸崎邸)

Setagaya, Tokyo

Sources checked October 2026

“A twelve-metre cube behind a concrete wall that curves inward to lead people to the entrance.”

Year: 1986
Architect: Tadao Ando
Type: Residence for three households
Access: Private residence, not open to visitors

Tadao Ando designed this Setagaya house for a couple and both of their sets of parents, three households in one building: a cube measuring twelve metres across, standing near the middle of a plot shut in by a tall concrete wall. Facing the street, the wall bends inward and draws visitors to the entrance, where the path splits into two flights of steps. Each family keeps its privacy, while the garden court to the south gives them a sense of living together.

A private, lived-in home: it is not open to visitors. It is placed without an address, from a public source, at neighbourhood or city level.

In depth ≈ 1 min read

History

Kidosaki House, designed and built between 1982 and 1986, stands in a quiet residential district of Setagaya ward. It houses three households: the couple who commissioned it and their respective parents. The plan secures each family's privacy and independence, while letting the three households lead an interwoven daily life.

Architecture

The scheme pairs a cube twelve metres on each side with a high concrete wall that closes off the plot. The cube sits near the centre, leaving a margin to the north, where the approach space lies, and another to the south, taken by a courtyard garden; the rooms of each dwelling run along the line joining these two open spaces. The wall beside the approach bends inward, as though beckoning people walking up the street. The path divides in two: wide steps descend from street level to the ground-floor garden in front of the parents' dwellings, while narrow steps climb to the couple's home. Each household thus keeps a high degree of privacy, while the courtyard, where the kinds of trees and shrubs the district used to have are grown, gives a feeling of shared life.

The building has three levels and rests on a square grid, with 556 m² of floor area. Ando borrows the courtyard of the traditional Japanese town house but builds it in concrete, which lets him spread it over several levels, something timber cannot do. The rooms look onto the courtyards through windows of varied formats, low or full-height, chosen so that occupants of different rooms never face each other directly.