Japan Leads in Micro-House Building

[Mulboyne]

"The Very Small Home" By Azby Brown
Telegraph: Turning Japanese, why aren't we turning Japanese?
When Tetsuo Furuichi was asked to build a three-storey building the width of a cricket pitch but four times as long, the Tokyo-based architect checked his diary to see it wasn't April 1. "The client wasn't joking. Basically, I'm building on a piece of reclaimed pavement. New technology means we can build narrow and high even in quake-prone Japan. I'm putting an Olympic length pool in the basement." Building in small awkward sites has become something of a Japanese speciality. In fact, so specialised and adept have they become at living it small, that architects and designers alike are lining up to peer into some of these little miracles...more...

[Taro Toporific]

[dimwit]

My guess is that if you surveyed most Japanese you'd found that they are a lot less than content with their limited space.

[Mulboyne]

Boston.com: Small is the new big

Some architects who design small houses look to Japan. Small homes are traditional there, but extraordinarily high prices for real estate, reached during the 1980s boom, have elevated comfortable living in a small house to an art form. When the Japanese say small, they mean 800- to 1,000-square-foot homes for couples or families with young children. Among Japanese architects, ''there seems to be some sense you can't say a house is well designed unless they've grappled with the issue of spatial constraints with finesse and creativity," said Azby Brown, a Yale- and University of Tokyo-trained architect who lives in Tokyo. Two features are critical to a well-designed small house. People must be able to move freely among the rooms. And there must be plenty of storage, to maintain a minimalist style that doesn't clutter the spaces and make them feel even smaller. Getting organized is required to live large in small spaces...''I've learned so much from the Japanese," said Susanka, who once lived with a family in Japan. ''There are things that are perfectly normal in Japan that we couldn't get an American family to do."

[Mulboyne]

commdesign "9 Tsubo House" site
Asahi: Living in a designer box
With its tiny wooden exterior and gable roof, it could be the little house on the prairie in Laura Ingalls Wilder's much-loved book. Behind its sliding front door, the residence that stands in an area of Tokyo still dotted with fields gives an entirely different impression. Measuring nine tsubo (one tsubo is about 3.3 square meters) the house is virtually a cubic box 5.4 meters square. Despite its modest dimensions, the house, quite simply, is spacious. Voices resonate around its high ceiling and, thanks to windows that take up most of one wall, the house is filled with light. "I like small houses. There's no wasted space. We are quite comfortable here," says Junko Miyama (not her real name), the owner's 32-year-old wife...more...

[dimwit]

Can fit perfectly in your average shipping container. Great for the upscale refugee.

[Mulboyne]

Telegraph: How many people can you get into a microhome?
When it comes to micro compact homes (m-chs), the big question is: do you have to have spent some time in a 20ft boat, a railway couchette or a galvanised coalbunker to acquire the spatial awareness needed to avoid barking both your shins and forehead on a m-ch's incredibly proximate surfaces? And the answer is, clearly, it would help...more...

[Mulboyne]

It seems this topic still has legs although there isn't really anything new here.

Business Week: Micro-Homes in the Big City

Small has always been beautiful in Japan, whether you think of the mini-component audio systems the country pioneered in the 1970s, its cultural love affair with miniaturized potted plants known as bonsai, or the current rage for small-engine mini-cars. Now you can add to the list the current home-design craze: ultra-compact micro-homes on plots so small they could fit into the garage space of your typical, sprawling McMansion in the U.S. Living small is in, especially among younger Japanese with modest budgets who no longer want to cope with the grueling commutes by train from far-off suburbs outside Tokyo as their parents did. Demand for ultra-compact homes, known as kyo-sho-jutaku in Japanese, is likely a small portion right now of the $1.2 billion Japanese currently spend on homes designed by architects.

But architects, home design magazines, and even some major Japanese companies are starting to take notice of the trend. It is being driven by the surprising fact that, despite Japan's already astronomical (by international standards) land prices, the four prefectures that comprise the Tokyo metropolitan area are among the fastest-growing nationally. Suitable land for housing in Tokyo is incredibly scarce, however. So some families are hiring architects to build the tiniest homes imaginable to live closer to the cultural amenities and excellent school systems available in Tokyo. "Recently, an increasing number of people, especially in their 30s and early 40s, desire to live in central Tokyo," says Shigeru Kimura, an independent real estate agent who specializes in micro-homes. "And more people are thinking of how to live on a small plot of land." Others are already based in Tokyo, clinging to a tiny patch of land, and want to replace decades-old wooden homes with new ones, but for the lowest cost possible. Take the case of Mayumi Takayanagi, an electronics company engineer who had lived with her parents for about 30 years in a two-story wooden house in the central Tokyo district of Sumida...more...

The article mentions Commdesign who appear earlier in this thread.

[Taro Toporific]

...Tokyo, clinging to a tiny patch of land, and want to replace decades-old wooden homes with new ones...

DEATH to those damn tax dodgers and land use criminals!

As far as new microhomes go....
Last month in my 'hood, crews came in thankfully ripped down a rat-filled kampo-ya shack that held some demented old fart that never threw out any garbage for 20 years. It took 18 loads of a large-ish dump truck to clear the site.

That single-family shack was replaced with a two-story EIGHT-plex. Yes, they put 8 apartments in the space of a two car garage in the real world. Those Micro-House promoters should burn in hell for causing such suffering, or better yet they should be forced to live in the dog shit housing they build.

[Mulboyne]

Some micro furniture for your micro home:

Asahi: Tiny furniture catches on

In 1999, when Yoshiaki Hatanaka's machine manufacturing company began to falter, Hatanaka, a machine designer, was shunted into the engineering management department...Looking to bring joy back into his life, [he] began spending his free time doing DIY carpentry, which he had always been interested in. But it was his wife Nobuko's request for "something much smaller and adorable" that sent his hobby hurtling in a new direction. The first miniature piece Hatanaka made was a dining table. "This is great! It makes me feel nostalgic," exclaimed Nobuko, now 57, when she saw the finished work. That was when Hatanaka decided to turn the craft into his vocation. His two-story home in Nishikyo Ward, Kyoto, serves as both his abode and workshop. It is an unexceptional house except for the sign that reads [url=URL="http://www5e.biglobe.ne.jp/~tenohira/]Tenohira-kobo[/url], or workshop of the palm. The door opens into a slightly large entrance hall that serves as the gallery. On display is a living room of the early Showa Era (1926-1989), where everything--a low wooden dining table, old zabuton cushions, a kaidan tansu or staircase-shaped chest, a hibachi--is one-tenth of the original size...more...