Luxury Home Designed to Worship Views of a Porsche
If you’re willing to spend over $84,000 on it, it’s probably safe to say that you really, really love your car. Enough, perhaps, to organize the design of your entire home around views of it, so you can maintain near-constant visual contact with your beloved automobile from every room. This luxury home in Osaka by Kenji Yanagawa makes a Porsche 911 the focal point in a central garage.
Set back protectively from the street, the garage forms the bottom level of the home; the living spaces cantilever above the driveway. A glass wall gives the adjacent music room prime views of the Porsche. Climb the stairs and you’ll still be able to see it from the kitchen, and then through a glass cube floor in the living room.
Open all the way from the ground floor to a series of large skylights in the roof, the stairwell acts as an atrium, flooding the garage with natural light to show off the Porsche to its greatest potential. Each room in the house opens to this atrium so inhabitants can look straight down onto the car.
This wide-open plan even extends to the bathroom, where half-height walls retain a connection to the atrium, and large sliding glass doors open onto a roof terrace set away from the street-facing facade. This terrace, and the one below it that extends from the living room, is wrapped in a steel envelope that provides privacy from neighboring houses.
About architect Kenji Yanagawa
“We want to create an architecture that coexists with the times and continues to talk about the times by overcoming the external factors that the times carry, starting from conveying images and sensibilities. The construction is located in a specific place, forms a cityscape, becomes a part of the city, and creates a living background for an unspecified number of people.”
“In other words, improving the quality of individual buildings is the only way to improve the quality of the city that is the background of life. Therefore, every building is public, even though it is an individual asset that owns it. Instead of building that violently imposes images and sensibilities, I would like to open up the sensibilities, read the potential and environment of the site, and aim to realize “architecture that cooperates and adapts.”
