A revolutionary residential project in Tokyo, Japan, challenges conventional notions of room division and spatial boundaries. The Overlap House, designed by Office Sugurufukuda under the leadership of architect Suguru Fukuda, presents a unique 74-square-meter living space completed in 2025 that abandons traditional wall-based room separation in favor of overlapping spatial boundaries.

The architectural concept centers on creating connections rather than divisions. Instead of using walls to separate spaces according to function, the design generates an expansive feeling that transcends ordinary residential layouts. The home's simple floor plan divides the space evenly into four segments, which might initially appear as identical studio units lined up in sequence. However, the strategic placement of openings and carefully designed connections between rooms prevent visitors from seeing the entire space at once.

This deliberate obstruction of sight lines creates a sense of depth that draws the gaze continuously inward. Each domain within the house is not clearly defined by walls or partitions but instead quietly overlaps with adjacent spaces while maintaining intervals of margin. As a result, no central room emerges from the design, and only a dispersed constellation of perspectives expands throughout the home.

The hall spans two of the four segments and features dramatic ceiling height variations ranging from 2.1 meters to 6 meters. These sectional shifts, combined with differences in natural light penetration, bring distinct flows of time into the parallel spaces. The limited number of openings deliberately fragments the outside scenery, withholding its totality from view. This fragmentation, combined with the non-centralized composition, allows perception of the house to expand toward the city while simultaneously allowing the urban environment to reverse into the house's interior.

The design creates unique acoustic and visual experiences through repetitive planes and deliberately obstructed sightlines. These elements produce situations where voices and sounds can be heard while bodies remain unseen, creating a sensation of distance that paradoxically feels close. Even without direct visibility, the palpable presence of others compels the imagination to fill in spatial gaps.

Architect Fukuda draws inspiration from cinematic techniques, particularly referencing Apichatpong Weerasethakul's film "Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives" from 2011. In this film, the lost wife and son return home as ghosts or spirits, portrayed not as objects of fear but as familiar beings who quietly inhabit the space. These figures appear in human form yet speak only when shown within the frame, while voices heard from outside the frame belong solely to the ghosts. This cinematic device emphasizes their "absence" while simultaneously engraving the trace of their having once been there.

The architectural photography by Yurika Kono and Kenya Chiba captures these ethereal qualities of the space, documenting how absence can vividly give rise to spatial depth. The images reveal how layers of presence, light, and sound interweave throughout the home to create an expanse that exceeds physical reality.

The Overlap House aspires to let such imagined depths and unseen yet undeniable presences quietly arise within daily life. The home, conceived as the most intimate of places, serves as a site capable of holding multiple strata of time and distance. Where time intersects in layers, the space quietly contains a vastness that transcends the real, offering residents an entirely new way of experiencing domestic architecture.