Homes We Love: Every day we feature an impressive space sent by our community of architects, designers, home builders, and homeowners. Have one to share? Post it here.Project Details: Location: Kanagawa, Japan Plastering: Imajo Sakan Professional photographer: Shinya Sato/ @shinyasato_hello From the Architect: “Haniyasu House is a
two-family home developed for our parents, who are ceramic artists, and for ourselves as designers. About 15 years back, our moms and dads moved to Kamakura looking for an environment where they might totally devote themselves to working with clay. The house is located at the edge of a valley called Yato, surrounded by steep cliffs into which horizontal cave burial places called yagura are carved– an environment where the presence of the earth is strongly felt. In order to challenge and react to the method this land exists, we took earth, humankind’s most ancient product, as our main theme and brought the architecture into being.”As a location fit to everybody, whose lives revolve around making, we imagined a primordial dwelling– one from a time whenliving and creating were not yet separated. We removed away the walls and ceiling of the existing home to form a single big area linked to its surroundings, and included brand-new rooms at its four corners, their forms evoking masses of earth emerging from the ground. Within the added volumes, everyone works and oversleeps a cave-like, enclosed area, while collecting in a central, plaza-like area to converse and share meals. We envisioned a way of life comparable to that of a little settlement.”The name Haniyasu Home derives from a deity in Japanese folklore who governs earth, soil, and pottery; hani is an antiquated Japanese word significance clay. As if offered to this divine being, your house seeks to unite with the land through earth as a medium, while transcending the frameworks of land, architecture, and pottery– becoming a vessel in which living and developing can remain inseparable.”We crushed clay-rich soil from the land, fired it in my daddy’s kiln, applied glazes, and burnt it with burners– duplicating numerous experiments in an effort to utilize the colors of
the earth itself as a material. In the final procedure, we bisque-fired discarded clay produced through my dad’s making process, layered it over the soil from the website, and then poured a plaster blended with iron and copper powder– by-products from a metal workshop– over the exterior walls of the extensions in multiple layers, like glaze, permitting oxidation to produce color through rust.”