In Bunkyo, Tokyo, Tetsushi Tominaga of TOMI Architects builds Obi House as a single-family residence whose three solid concrete tiers recall the broad sashes worn with kimonos — a compact urban house that earns its name through the discipline of its stacking.
The name refers to the obi, the wide textile band that wraps and secures the kimono, and the house reads accordingly: three horizontal volumes, each bearing the weight of the one above, each differentiated in its relationship to light and the street. The stacking is not merely formal. It is structural reasoning made legible — each tier resting with the inevitability of a well-tied knot, the whole coheisng through repetition and proportion rather than ornament.
The site in Kohinata, Bunkyo-ku covers 180 square metres and accommodates 118 square metres of floor area — a tight calculation that requires each storey to be precise. The ground floor opens to the street with a greater degree of permeability; the upper levels withdraw progressively, each floor a little further removed from the urban noise below. This graduated privacy is one of the project's most careful moves: the house does not seal itself off, but it earns its quiet incrementally.
Concrete throughout — not as declaration but as logic. The material allows the tiers to appear self-contained, each face reading as a complete surface before the next one begins. In a dense Tokyo neighbourhood where buildings compete for presence, Tominaga chooses restraint: no projections, no expressed structure, no gesture that does not belong to the broader formal system. The result is a house that is conspicuous only in its discipline.
Obi House was completed in 2012-2013, and it continues to circulate as one of the more quietly resolved urban houses of its decade — a reminder that the most interesting formal moves are sometimes borrowed from culture rather than invented from scratch, and that a house named for a textile can have the character of one.
