Village Kiramachi

Village Kiramachi restores and adaptively reuses a nine-building Kyoto machiya ensemble, linking it across a public lane to a separate reception/lounge as one ten-building lodging system. Guests follow three internal roji - two retained passages and one added lane - through seven guest buildings with fourteen rooms, an irori hearth building and a tea building. Selective repair preserves the houses' scale; new thresholds, gardens, open-air cypress baths and two streams fed by a revived well turn the spaces between buildings into the architecture that connects the whole.