Seamlessness is at the heart of this contemporary style home. Designed by Kengo Kuma, it was unveiled earlier this year at the annual Street of Dreams event in Happy Valley Oregon. Featuring as one of the five homes unveiled furing the event, it manages to really capture the spirit of Suteki, the Japanese homebuilder that commissioned it.
As Suteki’s CEO Koichiro Hirata puts it, they are “bringing a unique cross-cultural concept to our designs, combining the best of American modern amenities with the timeless Japanese principles of strength, harmony and balance with nature’.
This happens to be one of Kuma’s first home designs in the United States. However, he comes with an impressive resumé. A prolific writer on architectural subjects, he is professor at the Graduate School of Architecture at the University of Tokyo, has designed a host of hotels in several major cities, and most recently, took over responsibility for designing the 2020 Olympic Stadium in Tokyo upon the death of Zaha Hadid.
While this contemporary home design is a rather more modest undertaking, we are still transfixed by how smooth and sleek Kuma’s design is for the Street of Dreams.
One of the best manifestations of this are the windows which separate the central living area from the garden. With the frames embedded into the wooden decking, they take “floor to ceiling” to a whole new level.
Meanwhile, several slender steel pillars bear the load of the roof. Consequently, the inner space is unencumbered by the need for many solid walls. The result is a space which is as light and airy as they come.
Speaking of the roof, the slender design (as well as those load bearing pillars, enables the eaves to extend way beyond the interior space, thus allowing the outdoor space t be enjoyed throughout the winter months.
As a final remark, the landscaping, by Sadafumi Uchiyama, is really top notch. The design makes a special point of building the house around the best features of the pre-existing environment. This is most evident in the continued presence of a massive oak tree, and another massive sequoia tree, and the foregrounding of a stream that runs through the property.
That being said, the main theme of the landscape design is really in keeping with traditional mid-century modern homes, with small shrubs prevailing, and really allowing the house to take precedent, and complimenting it in every way possible. This last point is also well illustrated by the hardscaping, which continues the clean geometric lines which the house already offers in abundance.
Photos by Justin Krug
