How a Japanese Family of Five Live in Their Small Open Air Home, Tokyo 57sqm/613sqft
In our 57-square-meter world in the heart of Tokyo, the ceiling is not made of plaster or wood, but of the shifting Tokyo sky. As an interior designer, my dream was never about sprawling corridors or empty guest rooms; it was about creating a vessel for our family’s energy. In this small, open-air home, there is no place for secrets, only for the sound of my husband Jajiro and our three children talking and laughing. This proximity is my greatest comfort; I can always feel their presence, a constant heartbeat within these walls.
My creative process is one of rigorous intentionality. I am known to be “strict” about what enters our sanctuary. If someone offers us a gift—even a simple bowl—it must first pass through a conversation of necessity and aesthetic harmony. Every object must earn its place. We brought a piece of our history with us from New York: a heavy door from a public school in Queens where we lived eighteen years ago. It serves as our entrance now, a physical bridge between our past and this vibrant present.
Color is our language. While many Japanese architects seek to hide the clutter of daily life, we choose to celebrate it. We use a palette of five distinct, bold colors that even surprised our painters, reflecting Jajiro’s work as an artist. Our “visual storage” means our family’s shoes and coats are not hidden in dark closets but are part of the room’s texture, decorative elements of a life in motion.
There is a deep, emotional rhythm to how we use this space:
• The Ritual of the Bath: I designed the bathroom with a window that looks into the living room. It is a place where the children and I spend long hours together, relaxing and connecting, a quintessential Japanese ritual that feels even more intimate in a compact home.
• The Timeline of Chairs: For every baby we brought home, we bought a new dining chair. Those three chairs are more than furniture; they are a physical record of our family’s growth.
• The Poetry of Function: We sleep on futons so the rooms can breathe during the day, remaining wide and flexible for the children to play or study. Even our storage is an adventure—the shelf Jajiro built with our son doubles as a ladder to the sleeping quarters, turning a necessity of small-space living into a playful ascent.
This home is currently “version 5.4,” a living project that has taken three years to refine. People often worry that we will outgrow these 613 square feet, but I see it differently. The time with children is fleeting. I am designing not just for the chaos of today, but for the thirty or forty years after they leave, when this space will once again belong to just Jajiro and me. We have blurred the lines between inside and out, using the same colors for the interior and the roofless living room to ensure that, no matter how small the footprint, our home always feels as vast as the sky above us.