A remarkable residential project in Tokyo's Nerima district demonstrates how contemporary architecture can thoughtfully engage with existing urban landscapes. The Green House, designed by Shin Aoki and Partners and completed in 2025, strategically positions itself along a verdant pedestrian greenway where local residents cultivate flowers and fruit trees as part of their daily routines.
Rather than simply facing the linear environment like neighboring properties, this 69-square-meter house creates an entirely new spatial dialogue with its surroundings. The architects deliberately set the volume back from the street edge, breaking away from the typical pattern of houses built tightly against the roadway. This intentional setback creates space for both a functional terrace and a carefully sized front garden.
The outdoor spaces serve multiple purposes in the overall design strategy. The terrace accommodates casual DIY activities, while the front garden allows residents to tend to plants as part of their daily routines. Over time, these spaces are intended to function as extensions of the existing greenway, contributing to the collective landscape of the broader community. At the entrance, a bamboo flower vase secured with traditional Japanese nails provides a platform for displaying seasonal blooms as a welcoming gesture to passersby.
The building's façade responds directly to the mixed curvature and verticality of surrounding trees through a sophisticated combination of materials and surfaces. Copper panels installed in the traditional ichimonji-buki pattern work alongside Japanese cypress (hinoki) used as vertical cladding with varying orientations. A unifying stainless-steel curved roof caps the composition. Lead architect Shin Aoki emphasized that the design avoids imposing a single dominant expression or creating a visual collage, instead establishing an appearance that opens outward to invite imagination, ambiguity, and natural change over time.
Despite the compact 49-square-meter site, the project takes advantage of the legally defined 12-meter street width to maximize vertical volume. The interior operates as a continuous vertical one-room space composed of overlapping floor plates and interwoven niches, generating a three-dimensional living environment that feels much larger than its actual footprint.
On the first floor, the sculptural façade translates into an interior feature through a round timber column, around which a custom dining table was built. This central dining area receives illumination from a north-facing clerestory window that opens toward the greenway, creating a calm communal space filled with soft natural light throughout the day.
Private functions including the bathroom and toilet are consolidated on the second floor, organized around a circular circulation pattern centered on the toilet area. This layout allows for flexible occupation and future adaptation, with natural light introduced to accommodate various uses such as an office or gallery space without being defined by a single fixed program.
A tower-like vertical void on the south side serves as the primary light distribution system, bringing daylight through slatted floors to every level of the house. Light enters from openings at various heights and directions, reflecting off white interior surfaces to create a soft, atmospheric glow throughout the space. This shifting quality of light changes with the seasons, time of day, and weather conditions, producing an interior environment that feels alive with subtle variations while remaining both intimate and expansive.
Structural engineering for the project was provided by Yamabe Structure Office, ensuring the innovative vertical design meets all safety and building code requirements. Photography by Shota Hiyoshi captures the interplay between the building's material palette and the changing natural light conditions throughout different times of day.
The Green House represents a thoughtful approach to small-scale urban residential design, demonstrating how architects can create meaningful connections between private living spaces and public pedestrian infrastructure. By contributing to rather than simply occupying the existing neighborhood fabric, the project establishes a model for future residential development in dense urban contexts.
