This unusual house is situated not far from the coast in the north of the prefecture of Kyoto. Perched on a specially built platform, it overlooks the garden and the surrounding countryside – a valley to the east and a chain of mountains to the south. Its distinctive roof seems to rest lightly on a collection of rooms projecting from beneath it. The house´s unusual form results from the direct implementation of a carefully worked out functional diagram, one that turns traditional spatial concepts on their head. It reverses the “oku” principle of layering space in traditional Japanese houses, whereby the degree of privacy increases through a sequence of zones from the outside to the inside. Here, in Mineyama, the visitor passes through a tunnel entrance straight into the centrally located living room, with a square “irori”, or fireplace set into the floor, as its main focal point. The other areas in the building are laid out around this central core, in ever larger squares, the private rooms forming the outer, outward-facing layer.