LOVE HOUSE, a Windowless House

Building homes on miniature plots of land: in many of the densely populated cities in Japan, this is the challenge faced by architectural firms. At 3.3 metres wide and 10 metres deep, LOVE HOUSE, the project by the agency Takeshi Hosaka architects, manages to offer its inhabitants 33 m2 of living space on one floor. 

Built in the coastal city of Yokohama, south of Tokyo, the verticality of LOVE HOUSE hides an ingenious structure that makes you forget the limited amount of space. This white house has one distinctive feature: it has no windows. The creators of the structure opted to build the house around a curved courtyard, which allows daylight to flood in to each room.

Forgetting the absence of space

The ground floor, protected by a wooden staircase moulded in concrete, comprises the bathroom and a bedroom, while the kitchen and dining room are found upstairs, extending outside onto a terrace. The space is described on their website by architect Takeshi Hosaka as ‘neither inside nor outside, where the sun and rain of Yokohama can easily enter.’

In this miniature house, the firm Takeshi Hosaka Architects has made it possible to forget the absence of space. They repeated this feat shortly after, with the construction of another minimalist house, LOVE2 HOUSE. This constraint is now taken into account by a large number of Japanese architects like Atelier Bow-Wow, a firm entirely dedicated to Pet Architecture.

LOVE HOUSE (2005), a project by Takeshi Hosaka Architects, is visible on their website.