Category: Japan – Living

This house takes the early lead in the ugliest house in my neighborhood competition. I write “lead” but I honestly hope this one takes first prize because it’s butt-ugly and I’d hate to see anything worse. Its roof kind of reminds me of American Googie architecture of the 50’s, places like the Hawthorn Grill or Johnnie’s on Wilshire in Los Angeles. The air-conditioning fans nestled into the inset windows don’t help either.

This home is just down the street from us, and on first glance it seems to be yet another modern house built according to templated plans by Japanese companies like Seiksui House, Misawa, or Hebel House. These houses dominate the modern suburban landscape with their drab boxy exteriors. But this house is a little unusual: it is the house of a family that runs a san-gawara (glazed ceramic tiles) company named “Kato Kawara-ten”. And so, as I’ve pointed out by the arrow, they have adorned the side of their house with gawara-covered gables (I believe that’s the correct architectural term) that are fronted by oni-gawara (from Antipixel: “Oni-gawara (demon plates) perform the same function as Western finials and gargoyles: they ward off evil […]”). These particular ones bear their family name. (In point of fact, I’m not sure if that qualifies them as oni-gawara or some other type of decoration).

You can click on the above picture to be taken to a close up picture of one of these oni-gawara.

Not surprisingly, there are “collections” of oni-gawara on the web, though I didn’t find as many as I thought:

Onigawara Museum
Interesting Onigawara

You might also want to take a look at the web site for Yamamoto Co. They’re a famous oni-gawara manufacturer based in the Sansyu Gawara area in Aichi prefecture near Nagoya (around 50% of all kawara is made in this area). A nice range of styles are shown there, and also pictures of the manufacturing process.

This house is just next door to the homes I pictured in the previous post, and it’s probably my favorite of the homes on our street. I love the terraced effect of the roofs, which seem in harmony to the equally wonderful angled entrance. Our future home should we come to build it (I’ll post more on this later) will sit on a corner property, and I’ve been eyeing this house for inspiration on how to handle that placement. There’s no real functional need (that I can think of) for having the entrance there, but doing so seems to make the house bigger.