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Ugly Office Building is Renovated into an Airy Japanese Live/Work

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What a unique idea: climbing on a centrally placed boxy piece of furniture to get up to the bright day light of the upper floor.

Making the furniture/staircase a beautiful piece of furniture in its own right makes the strange idea feel legitimate.

This box shape in the middle of the open space seems almost as if it was cut from the floor above.

The storage box-stair accessing the top floor is the central conceit in the renovation of an old Tokyo office building, by Torafu Architects.

Before conversion, the 40 year old spaces were poky and dark, with tiny partitions cutting off the daylight all around the building.

Now the morning sun streams right in to the library/work area in a flexible loft-type space that also hosts the dressing room and sleeping.

In traditional Japanese style, for sleeping: a tatami mat is rolled out on the floor at night and is just completely packed away in the morning.

Upstairs, the public spaces are even more light-filled, drinking in light with windows on all four sides.

The huge square opening means the maximum light from all these windows pours down the stairwell, illuminating the 2nd floor.

The kitchen and dining room are on the top floor. Beneath the kitchen, on the sleeping floor is the bathroom, not shown.

Access to a balcony seen on the left here relieves the claustrophobia that bedevils city dwellers.

The design succeeds because it creates open airy spaces on both floors – in marked contrast to the poky spaces that were here before this renovation, and also compared to the cramped apartments of surrounding Tokyo.

Via Arch Daily with photos by Daici Ano