TAKI 滝

Niseko Town in Hokkaido, the northernmost region in Japan, has become one of the world’s leading winter resorts where a total number of 200,000-plus foreign tourists visit annually. The clients, a couple based in Hong Kong, love great nature of Niseko deeply, and requested us to design a building that blends naturally into winter snow and summer greenery there. The site is situated on a vast extent of sloping land full of rush greenery with large trees. Since the area is subject to heavy snow exceeding 2 meters in winter, the access between the slope and the building used for snow countermeasures is very important. This building was named “TAKI” (meaning a “waterfall” in Japanese) by the clients, inspired from the landscape design where water drawn from the nearby creek flows into the entrance approach. This space perfectly conveys the image of the earth, water, fire, and wind of Japan.