For a few brief moments, the entrance to Toru Shimokawa’s home in Kurume looks, smells and feels recognisably – almost classically – Japanese. The mixture of light and dark woods; the waft of cedar and plum blossom, the hard-fought quest for insularity amid the tight jostle of neighbouring houses. No traditions feel in immediate danger of being broken. Shoes are removed at the tiled genkan entranceway before the high, deliberately disconnective step onto tatami; a knee-level ikebana arrangement has been set to honour the guest; an uneven pillar of sanded mulberry softens the corner into a shoji screen-lined entrance room.
But the illusion of familiarity is brief. Once I am up on the tatami – and now officially “inside” the home – the first of Shimokawa’s gentle architectural ambushes is triggered: “1,950mm high,” beams the 42-year-old architect, raising his hand to the room’s low wooden ceiling and clearly enjoying both the engineered sense of confinement and the visitor’s instinctive duck of the head. “This was my first home,” he says of the house he was born in, “so I wanted to experiment with it.”
In fact, this house is not the actual building he was born in but another, completed in 2015, that sits on the same site. The house makes for a far more conservative take on many of his more radical creations, but still bears the hallmarks of a design practice that marries traditional architecture with modern interventions in a career that first made its presence felt in 2009 when he was named in Wallpaper* magazine’s architects directory as one of the 30 most exciting names to have emerged around the world. This is now the 20th year since he decided, with no formal training, to start an architectural firm. “I was never taught about architecture,” he explains. “But looking back now at the things I was sketching as a child and a teenager, what I was drawing was architecture,” he says.
Current and past projects include an art gallery in Fukuoka, a buckwheat soba noodle restaurant, a little nirvana of thatch and waterfalls a 30-minute drive away in Dazaifu, a hot-spring project at Niseko Weiss and the reconstruction of a shrine. His work is increasingly concentrated on high-end private homes around the country whose owners, from tech entrepreneurs to psychiatrists, share his view that classic Japanese architectural styles are there to be simultaneously cherished and tweaked. And yet, even as his new commissions arrive from the wealthy playgrounds of Karuizawa, Niseko and elsewhere, he is unmoved by the magnetic fields of Kyoto or Tokyo. Shimokawa remains resolutely committed to being a Kyushu-bred architect in Kyushu.
Shinichi Takaki is the owner of the Yasutake Soba noodle shop, in Dazaifu, which was completed in October 2024. “My impression of Shimokawa is of a pure person in terms of architecture,” he says.
“When we first met with him at his home, I had the impression that his architecture would not deteriorate, but just become more beautiful. So I asked him to design my restaurant. He is very passionate in his pursuit of beauty, and how to move people’s hearts in various different ways. He is a maniac for beauty.”
“Toru Shimokawa has managed to reconcile the craft techniques of carpentry and the use of traditional and historic materials with an aesthetic that is clear, crisp and contemporary,” says Edwin Heathcote, the FT architecture critic. “In a nation still in thrall to the fetish of the new, where houses often last barely a generation, Toru Shimokawa traces a line between past and present, retaining existing fabric where possible but also acknowledging that history can be embodied in the process and knowledge of making, as well as in the finished object. His approach to landscape, the flow of space between interior and garden and the subtleties in the architectural delineation of those barely visible boundaries create an exquisite architecture in which history is profoundly present, even if his buildings appear utterly and elegantly modern.”
Shimokawa’s home has proven the perfect fulcrum for his tweaking. The confined Japanese-style room at the entrance, for example, is a calculated onslaught of the very traditional: it is influenced by the dimensions and scale of Japanese tea houses. It feels low by modern standards. He opens the small door into the main living room, and suddenly all that temporal and physical constriction is released. Minimalism has sped through the epochs. The ceiling, no longer flat and low, sweeps upwards to the full, glorious height of the house. The floor is tiled. The windows are huge. The airflow feels entirely different. There is no downlighting, only standing lamps with cords that vanish into the floor. Decades of evolution in Japanese home design gust along the floor and up into the ridged wooden rafters. A large ceramic hibachi squats at the heart of the room, subtly aglow.
Shimokawa’s home sits on a residential street a few hundred metres from the broad, winding Chikugo river in northern Kyushu. This the most southern of Japan’s four main islands – a stunningly beautiful part of the country known for its food, hot springs and as the main producer of Japanese green tea. Kyushu’s most famous architectural son is Arata Isozaki, the Pritzker Architecture Prize winner of 2019. Kurume is a large suburb of Fukuoka city: potentially forgettable if it did not punch so far above its weight as the home of Seiko Matsuda, the “eternal idol” pop superstar, and Kiyonori Kikutake, a founding member of Japan’s Metabolist architectural movement and designer of the iconic Edo-Tokyo museum.
The visions of Toru Shimokawa
And yet Shimokawa grew up in a world unconnected with architecture. His father and mother, he says, had unrelated jobs and, unlike most others, Shimokawa did not go to university. Entirely self-taught, he did not have the resources to tour Japan looking at architecture, and so he looked more locally around him and learnt what he could from books. “When you are in your teens or 20s, you look at the things that are closest to you,” he explains. “If you don’t have money you just see as much architecture as you can. So after doing what I could on a small budget I would study in books. But the more I studied, the more I began to see the difference between good and bad. If you know what is good, you already have a base, so you can build on that.”
By the age of 21, he decided to set up an architectural design firm. “At first, I didn’t have any work, because there was no way anyone was going to commission a 21-year-old who didn’t know anything and hadn’t studied architecture,” he says. “But then someone suddenly invited me to do a small job and that turned into more interior design work, and then houses and so on.” He is reluctant to acknowledge that his style has been shaped by any particular influence. “I don’t think there is an architect who thinks completely originally,” he says. “Everyone – Tadao Ando or Kazuyo Sejima – is imitating someone else. When I think about what is the basis of good architecture in Kyushu or Kyoto, I realise that old temples and shrines are the purest form. I learnt from visiting temples, shrines and Japanese architecture, and that has become my natural style. But that alone is not enough for the modern age.”
Shimokawa is married to a formally trained architect who has worked with him since 2008. Although the architectural firm bears his name, in the house next door, which the pair have converted into a design studio and office, the husband and wife’s desks sit side by side.
Within the Shimokawa story, the rebuilding of homes close to the architect’s heart holds a particular importance. His first great formative project was the house his parents eventually moved to, which he radically rebuilt in concrete in 2007. On that front, Shimokawa is in excellent company. Many Japanese architects cite the rebuilding of their parents’ home as being among their most significant projects – for many it is the first moment they are handed full creative control.
That pattern is common because one of the great defining features of Japanese home ownership in the postwar period was the expectation that most residential homes would at some point be torn down. “In the past, Japanese people used to scrap and build over the course of 20 to 30 years – completely different from Europe and America,” says Shimokawa, who says that Japanese housebuilding was dominated historically by the idea that a house’s value would automatically fall. He now sees Japan’s economy pushing its architecture to a critical turning point where gradual improvement is replacing this instinct. “The Japanese way of thinking is changing. We are now in an era when we have no choice but to renovate, because the costs are higher. My own mind is also changing. Young people think about fixing things, or making things that last.”
Back in the living room, one experiences the second of Shimokawa’s ambushes. The roof of the main living room extends out and back towards the genkan to cover a large external terrace. This sets up, he says, a visual ambiguity between inside and outside, purposefully playing on what has always been a diamond-hard Japanese distinction between the two. Inside is you and yours, outside is everything else. But with the shoji screens opened, there isa view from the entranceway through three zones of the house into the garden – a Japanese-style rockery punctuated with plum and other trees. The effect of the through-view is heightened, he says, by having elevated the house about 1.5m above ground level. “You are inside, then you see outside, then you see the living room, and then beyond that the outside,” he says, relishing the idea that this builds what he calls an “endless relationship” between the garden and house.
He leans back on a chair and sips tea from a cup designed by Takayuki Watanabe, a ceramicist who also fashioned a spectacular sphere that perches on the piloti as one passes along the serpentine garden path.
“I have done a lot of experimentation,” he says, in evident joy at the home he has created for his young family. Along the way, he has attained a quintessentially Japanese feel for detail. For example, sliding doors are generally moved by gripping a small oblong indentation. Shimokawa has replaced that oblong with a brass ingot with an inset figure of eight of his design that perfectly guides the fingers to the optimum location to move the door. “I spend a lot of time thinking about things during the design and construction period,” he continues. “But once I hand it over to the client, that’s the end isn’t it? It feels good to look at this and know it is your own home.”
It is easy to forget that this is, for all its overwhelming minimalism and power to surprise, a family home. His wife accepts a compliment about the lack of clutter by indicating an austere cupboard in which she says everything is hidden away.
The third great architectural trick of the Shimokawa home is its kitchen, which is sunken 60cm below the living room and separated by a broad wooden counter. On the garden side of the counter are four low wicker stools – this is the family table. On the other are the sink and cooking surfaces. Whoever is cooking is not only at the exact eye level of any inhabitants of the stools, but is able to look back across the living room in a way that creates an infinity-pool garden view.
The effect of all this is both subversive and inclusive. And, in its purity of execution, a triumph of design. Food is served comfortably from the kitchen and cleared instantly down into the sink. Yes, it may sound odd to organise a family table like a panel, but the practical reality of Japanese family life is that one adult is generally busy in the kitchen as the children eat. “I thought it would be better if we were closer to each other’s eye level,” explains Shimokawa simply. A traditional family table may feel inclusive, but lived reality tells you it isn’t always so. Shimokawa’s sunken kitchen admits something of modern life that traditional architecture has pretended is otherwise.
torushimokawa.com
