Apartment in Katayama by Mitsutomo Matsunami

Photo © Mitsutomo Matsunami
 
 
The beautiful facade of this apartment building caught our attention, and we couldn’t help but ask the architect to show us the interior of each unit. we must say that simplicity and complexity interact in a perfect manner here, making this one of the best design for a small apartment building in Japan in recent years.

Designing an apartment building in an urban setting often forces an architect to follow the same practices established in the name of efficiency — what can you do when there is less than 1,200 square feet of land, and you need to squeeze in 10 apartments in the building? You just stack up ten boxes in cost-effective construction methods, right?

For the good of their business, the community and people who live in the building, the developer of Apartment in Katayama wanted to do the ‘box stacking’ differently and elegantly without economic sacrifice. They brought in Mitsutomo Matsunami, a very young architect based in Osaka, and the result is this stylish seven story building with ten studio and duplex apartments — even accommodating a parking (bicycles, one or two cars) and storage rooms on the ground floor.

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© Mitsutomo Matsunami
 
^Who: Mitsutomo Matsunami
^What: Apartment building
^Where: Katayama-cho, Suita City, Osaka Prefecture
^When: March 2007
^How: Seven-story reinforced concrete construction
^{Site Area:} 1,190 square feet (110.55m²)
^{Total Floor Area:} 3,675 square feet (341.38m²)
^{Number of Apartments:} 10
^{Floor Area per Apartment:} 250 sf ~ 384 sf (23.2m² ~ 35.7m²)
^{Photographer:} Mitsutomo Matsunami
 
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