Month: April 2023

The project is a renovation to divide a 130-year-old storehouse built in the Meiji era into a French restaurant “NIM” and a residence for the owner-chef and his family in Daishinmachi, that retains the traditional townscape of Hida Takayama. The exterior is almost untouchable because the storehouse is located in the Important Preservation District for Groups of Historical Buildings designated by Takayama City. The client asked me to take advantage of this constraint and create an interior with a worldview that would be unimaginable from the exterior. I have visited the existing storehouse without any preconceived notions or design ideas. The structure was very impressive because it was quite large for a storehouse, with a frontage of 4 spans and a girder of 8 spans and it has a rugged frame typical of Takayama, with a ridgepole made of splendid logs and two intersecting beams. I felt that the scale of the space, the framework of the structure, and the unique atmosphere created by the darkness of the storehouse should be respected. On the other hand, it was difficult to divide into two uses by inserting a wall without destroying this spatial characteristic. The design theme was the action itself of inserting a wall to divide it into two uses and the interior of the store was completed with only the inserted wall because I wanted to limit the scope of modifications due to the budget limited.