🇯🇵Japan·Private home, not open to visitors

Matsumura House (松村邸)

Higashinada Ward, Kobe, Hyōgo Prefecture

Sources checked October 2026

“A house with a triangular roof and brick walls, built while keeping three camphor trees.”

Year: 1975
Architect: Tadao Ando
Type: Detached house
Access: Private residence, not open to visitors

Completed in 1975 in the Higashinada ward of Kobe, Matsumura House came from a commission received early in Ando's career. On a plot enclosed by stone walls, he wanted a peaceful dialogue with the place: a triangular roof, brick walls and three camphor trees left in place.

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

In the early 1970s, when he was starting his practice as an architect, Ando received almost at the same time two commissions for houses in two districts called Sumiyoshi, one in Osaka and one in Kobe. In Osaka he replaced the middle house of a row of three with an all-concrete court house, the Row House in Sumiyoshi (住吉の長屋), which drew the criticism, when it was presented, that it was "an architect's high-handedness". In Kobe it was Matsumura House, completed in 1975.

Ando recounts that the two houses ended up looking very different, but that their starting point is the same: a response to the existing environment. Maintenance work has given the house back, some forty years on, the appearance it had when completed; for Ando, designing homes remains the origin of his architecture.

Architecture

The plot, in an upmarket residential district of Kobe, is enclosed by stone walls and measures a little over a hundred tsubo (more than 330 m²). Three fine camphor trees had taken root there. Ando wanted "a house that converses gently with the existing environment": a triangular roof and brick walls, in harmony with the place, and he built while leaving the camphor trees in place.