The fourth premise of ‘NIPPONIA HOTEL Ozu Castle Town’ is the MUNE House which is named after Yasumune Kato, the 4th Lord of Ozu Clan.

The planned construction site is located on the east of the OKI House, on the opposite side of the street, which was renovated in prior. In the late Edo period Chojiro Murakami owned the land in the middle of which used to be an open space for drying vegetable wax. The area is surrounded by warehouses and nagaya (terraced houses) and served as garden for the houses. Looking up towards the east of the garden, the woods on the sacred mountain, where Ozu Shrine is situated, sits firmly.

In this project we renovated two warehouses and six wooden terraced houses to create nine rooms (one building was divided into two rooms) of a dispersed hotel. We decided to turn the ground level of the building facing the street into a shop. The original buildings were almost 150 years old, built sometime between the late Edo and early Meiji periods. The warehouses used to store the ingredients of vegetable wax, and it is believed that the craftsmen who built Garyu Sanso Villa, a National Important Cultural Property, lived in the terraced houses. The buildings had been long abandoned and some of them were in bad states, having holes and leaks on their roofs and even being on the verge of collapse.

Where the damages were particularly severe, it was required to develop plane plans which maintains the existing layout, as any dramatic changes to the buildings’ original plane plans could have affected their antiseismic performances. During construction, we chose the construction sequence to replace materials for making components while conducting earthquake reinforcement. Traditionally, as well as in modern wooden building, a joint method called tsugite is used to increase the length of wooden parts like beams and pillars. Any rotten beams and pillars were restored with the method. Also, in order to maintain the senary of the street and the façades of the buildings as much as possible, the seismic reinforcements are applied inside the buildings. Old buildings are built only with limited natural materials such as wood, paper, clay, iron and stones. This means that connection sections can easily be seen and replaced. We tried to fix damages by using natural materials and simple ways in order to leave the old parts as much as possible.

Another feature of this project is the garden. The carefully grown and shaped plants, which took long time to cultivate, offer different views in each season. The backdrop of the garden is Mt. Tomisuyama on which Nyoho-ji Temple is situated. Successive lords of Ozu Clan are enshrined in the temple, also a National Important Cultural Property. As for the selection of trees, the same species of trees which had already been planted in the garden were chosen. In this way, the newly added parts would merge into the existing parts completely in a few decades time. It was also decided that the stone tools, which were used to be used in the production of vegetable wax, would remain there as part of the senary. We hope this will remind people of the past when the garden was a drying area of vegetable wax. For the finish of the path, the floor is covered with soil originally used to make clay roof tiles mixed with strained lees of Japanese wax tree, ingredient of vegetable wax. The lees were donated by Tsurukame Kita Factory of CERARICA NODA Co., Ltd., which still produces vegetable wax using the oldest fire-tube boiler in Nagahama, Ozu city since 1919. The lees of Japanese wax tree, put into handmade Ikazaki Japanese paper and framed, is also used as interior decoration. It is used as colouring material for Tobe ware vases in the rooms. We chose repairing methods which give new light to local historical resources, for example by giving new uses to materials which are bound to be disposed of, such as the soil which were found at the site or the strained lees.

The terraced houses face the street running from Asamoya (Town Market and Tourist Information Center) to Garyu Sanso via Ohanahan-dori. Facing the street is a shop with characteristics of an old Japanese house. The shop is available to the tourists who visit Garyu Sanso as well as the guests of the hotel so they can experience the features of old houses. This will also help revitalize the area.

We think that this project is successful in terms of finding new values as well as old by restoring the architecture and connecting the thread of time.