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A 75-year-old house on a Japanese peninsula was not remade by erasing its past. Giselle Go and Philippe Terrien, co-founders of the clean-beauty company DamDam, worked with architect Motosuke Mandai of Mandai Architects to preserve the building’s timber character while making it comfortable as a weekend home near Tokyo. The result, documented by Architectural Digest on September 7, 2022, is a study in selective change: keep the beams, ceiling and shoji, replace what cannot be saved, and introduce daylight and outdoor connections exactly where the old plan failed.
The house overlooks the Pacific Ocean and Mount Fuji, but it had been dilapidated for decades and received little sunlight. Its calm atmosphere comes from specific decisions—traditional ranma panels converted into tall glazing, a kitchen opened to the garden, an enlarged engawa leading to a seaside deck, and a private bedroom left fully enclosed—not from a generic “zen” formula.
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The brief: a quiet pied-à-terre with a difficult starting point
Go and Terrien were looking for a private weekend pied-à-terre within reach of Tokyo. Naoko Kawamura introduced them to a house built by the American postwar photojournalist Horace Bristol. They fell for the peninsula’s setting and its views across the Pacific toward Mount Fuji, even though the building had stood in poor condition for decades.
The owners described the renovation as a balance between memory and present-day use. Philippe Terrien summarized the challenge as “keep[ing] as much of the past while equipping it with the modern comforts that are more suited to our current lifestyle.” That sentence explains why the project reads as a restoration and a re-planning exercise at the same time. The architecture was not treated as a museum object, but neither was it cleared for a contemporary interior inserted inside an old shell.
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The property also came with location-specific oversight. Terrien said the house was in a protected location overseen by a local temple and that the owners worked closely with the temple and their architect to meet applicable regulations. The feature does not identify the legal designation or a particular statute, so that account should not be generalized to every historic or temple-adjacent property in Japan.
What was saved, and what had to be remade
The preservation strategy began with the original shell. Existing wood beams, the ceiling and shoji screens were retained. These elements carry the proportions, texture and filtered-light quality associated with the house’s Japanese construction, so keeping them did more than preserve objects; it kept the rooms legible as the same building.
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One free scan finds every outdated or missing driver and matches the right update for your exact hardware.Free scan · exact hardware matchNot everything could survive. The original wood floors and wood-burning stove were beyond salvage, according to the owners. They replaced both with the same materials, an approach intended to preserve visual and tactile continuity rather than introduce a conspicuously new finish. Matching material is not the same as retaining original fabric, and the distinction matters when evaluating the project: the floor and stove are reconstructions, while the beams, ceiling and shoji are retained components.
That selective method avoids two common renovation failures. A purely cosmetic restoration can leave a house dark, inefficient or awkward to use; a wholesale modernization can make the original structure disappear. Here, replacement is concentrated where deterioration demanded it, while surviving elements remain the visual framework for new work.
How the renovation solved the daylight problem
The house lacked sunlight, so Mandai introduced floor-to-ceiling windows within traditional ranma panels. Ranma are the transom-like sections above sliding doors or partitions; adapting them for glazing allowed the architect to add a substantial amount of glass without discarding the panel language that belonged to the house.
The owners said the new openings brought natural light into the interior and produced the visual impression of a floating roof. That effect is architectural, not a measured performance claim: the published feature gives no daylight readings, energy calculations or before-and-after lux levels. The important lesson is the placement of the intervention. Instead of treating every wall as available for large contemporary windows, the design used an existing traditional zone to solve a specific environmental weakness.
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Re-centering daily life on the kitchen, garden and sea
The kitchen was enlarged by removing the former bathroom that shared its space. That change is less visible in photographs than a new window, but it reorganized the home around a room used for gathering, preparing food and moving between inside and out. Side doors now connect the central kitchen directly to the garden.
The former engawa—an access hallway linking rooms—was expanded into a sunroom. From there, the house opens onto a seaside deck used for sunset drinks and for holding seedlings before they are planted. The sequence creates a practical gradient: enclosed rooms, a bright intermediate zone, then the open deck and garden. It allows the owners to experience the coastal setting without making every room fully exposed.
These moves are not simply decorative gestures toward nature. They assign clear jobs to thresholds. The kitchen doors support everyday circulation; the sunroom extends living space; and the deck accommodates both leisure and gardening. A renovation can achieve an indoor-outdoor feeling more convincingly by giving each transition a use than by adding oversized glass everywhere.
Room-by-room: how the character is assembled
Entry and mudroom
The entrance doubles as a mudroom. Philippe Terrien described leaving shoes there and changing into house slippers, a small ritual that makes the threshold operational rather than ceremonial. An Eames Hang-It-All coat rack, a stool and a washi tray associated with DamDam Atelier furnish the space. The combination supports storage, changing and arrival without crowding the first room.
Living room facing the sunset
The living room faces the sea and sunset, with additional windows toward the garden. In winter, the owners gathered around the wood-burning stove; the replacement stove therefore restores a social function as well as a material reference. The furnishings mix Japanese design and international modernism: an Isamu Noguchi Akari 21A pendant light, Flos lamps, an Ethnicraft N701 modular sofa and a Cassina Airframe coffee table.
The notable point is not any single label but the way the pieces sit within the old envelope. A modular sofa supports relaxed weekend use, while the pendant and lamps provide multiple levels of illumination in a room whose architecture already supplies strong horizontal and vertical lines.
Dining and work area
Original shoji face bamboo to the north. To the west, the room looks toward the sea and doubles as a workspace, making the dining zone useful beyond meals. Named pieces include a Verner Panton Flowerpot pendant, Arne Jacobsen Series 7 chairs, a David Chipperfield Airframe table for Cassina with a restored walnut top, and an Isamu Noguchi Akari 3x table lamp.
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Sunroom and seaside deck
The enlarged sunroom is the home’s intermediary space. It opens to the deck, where the owners drink at sunset and keep seedlings before planting them. An Akari 1AG table lamp, an antique rattan table, a vintage lounge chair and a Malawi chair furnish the room. Handmade objects, personally sourced pieces and travel-found textiles add irregularity to the otherwise disciplined material palette.
Bedroom and bath
The bedroom is the only fully enclosed room. Its ranma was not fitted with glass, a deliberate decision to protect privacy and quiet. The room includes a Timber Crew bed frame and a Flos Archimoon Soft lamp. At the end of the bathroom is a large ofuro bath, giving the bathing area a distinct destination rather than treating it as a compact utility corner.
A material language that crosses cultures without becoming theme décor
Retained ranma and shoji sit alongside charred cedar floors and pine ceilings, while vintage and mid-century furniture, Japanese craft and textiles gathered through travel complete the interiors. Go and Terrien said their choices reflect their Filipino and French backgrounds and lives spent outside their countries of origin.
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That context helps explain the house’s restraint. The interior is Japanese in its inherited construction and relationship to thresholds, but it is not presented as a reconstruction of a traditional period room. International furniture, personal objects and textiles make the retreat belong to its occupants. The contrast is useful for anyone renovating an older home: authenticity can come from preserving structure and using objects with meaning, not from buying a complete set of historically matching décor.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.Three design tensions the project handles well
Preservation versus comfort
Keeping beams, ceiling and shoji protects the building’s identity; replacing the irreparable floor and stove and enlarging key rooms addresses modern use. The project treats comfort as a reason to intervene precisely, not as permission to remove everything inconvenient.
Daylight versus privacy
Glazed ranma panels bring light into shared spaces, while the unglazed bedroom ranma keeps the sleeping room secluded. The distinction shows that daylight does not require identical treatment in every room.
Enclosure versus connection
The closed bedroom, open living outlook, garden-linked kitchen and deck-facing sunroom create a range of exposure. Indoor-outdoor living is therefore distributed across thresholds instead of imposed as a single glass-walled condition.
What this example means for a heritage-sensitive renovation
If you are adapting an older house, the project offers a process rather than a style kit. Start by documenting what is genuinely original and what is unsafe or beyond repair. Then identify the daily problems—here, darkness, a cramped kitchen and weak connections to the garden—that justify structural changes.
- Survey the existing fabric. Record beams, ceilings, screens, floors, stoves, openings and signs of deterioration before design decisions are made.
- Separate retain, repair and replace. Mark elements that can remain untouched, those that need conservation, and those that must be rebuilt. If a replacement is proposed, specify whether matching material is required for visual continuity.
- Map light and privacy by room. Decide where high-level glazing, filtered screens or solid walls are appropriate. Do not assume the bedroom, kitchen and living room need the same exposure.
- Rework circulation around real activities. A side door is valuable when it shortens the path from kitchen to garden; an expanded intermediate room is valuable when it supports work, storage or seasonal use.
- Confirm local oversight early. Where a temple, historic district or other authority oversees the setting, ask the architect to identify the applicable approvals and coordinate with the responsible body before drawings are finalized.
- Choose furnishings after the spatial decisions. Use furniture, lighting and textiles to express the occupants’ lives while allowing the original architecture to remain visible.
These steps cannot guarantee the same result. The Japanese house benefits from its peninsula, ocean and Mount Fuji outlook, conditions no interior specification can reproduce. They do, however, keep the renovation focused on problems that design can actually solve.
What the published account does—and does not—establish
The Architectural Digest feature, published September 7, 2022 and photographed by Yasuhiro Takagi, is a reported home tour based on the owners’ interviews. It identifies the architect, the builder attributed to the house and the principal alterations, but it is not an official building record or an independent inspection.
No project cost, floor area, energy-saving figure, construction schedule or measured daylight result is provided. The house’s “75-year-old” description is a project-age descriptor, not a statistic from a building survey. Claims about the protected setting and temple coordination belong to the owners’ account, and the feature does not establish a universal rule for renovations in protected Japanese locations.
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Why the retreat feels “zen” without being a standardized style
The calm impression comes from the combination of landscape, controlled openings, tactile materials, a restrained room sequence and objects that have personal or cultural meaning. It is not evidence of a single standardized architectural system called “zen.” The house feels quiet because each intervention has a job and because the owners allowed some rooms to remain enclosed, some to open outward and some to mediate between the two.
That is the most transferable idea in this renovation. Preserve the parts that carry memory, change the parts that prevent the house from working, and let light, privacy and movement determine where the new openings go. The resulting retreat is modern enough for weekend life while remaining recognizably the old Japanese house.
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