suzuko yamada builds brutalist home for humans and cats in tokyo

nakano house: Brutalism on a Feline Scale

Suzuko Yamada Architects’ Nakano House isn’t so much built as it is carefully wedged into a 26-square-meter pocket of Tokyo. Despite its compact footprint, this Brutalist dwelling makes a surprisingly grand statement. Designed for a couple and their two cats, the house treats architecture less as a set of rooms and more like a curated arrangement of elemental forces: concrete, light, air — and cats, of course. ‘As long as there was an outer shell for living and space for the cats to run around,’ the clients said, ‘the rest could come together over time.’ This care-free brief is just the kind of prompt on which Japanese architect Suzuko Yamada thrives.

images © Kei Sasaki

A compact Concrete home in tokyo

Suzuko Yamada Architects approaches its Nakano House by occupying the entire lot edge-to-edge, constructing a thick concrete perimeter that at once shields and defines the interior parameters. Inside, essentials like the kitchen, bath, and toilet coexist with less conventional features: cat walkways, handrails, and stairs that feel more sculptural than functional. ‘These components feel oversized in relation to the house,’ the architects explain. ‘Their scale is the same — or even larger — than the rooms themselves.’ In this compact home, there’s no single viewpoint that reveals the full picture. Instead, architecture becomes a series of tactile fragments: the cool dampness of raw concrete, soft shafts of light, the faint scuff of feline paws.

Suzuko Yamada designs the compact, Brutalist home for a couple and their two cats

suzuko yamada’s ‘string of voids’

Inside its Nakano House, Suzuko Yamada Architects orchestrates a choreography of voids. Life, it seems, happens not within rooms but in the negative space between forms. Activities like cooking or laundry become spatial negotiations between monolithic elements. ‘The family of objects appears to have looked for and found their places within the structure,’ the architects note, describing a kind of architectural natural selection. The two cats traverse this new terrain with ease, moving through openings and around corners, trailing breezes that thread the structure with fresh air and ambient noise from the street.

Nakano House occupies the entire 26 square meter lot in a dense Tokyo neighborhood

The architects reject the idea of a ‘seamless integration’ between architecture and life. Instead, they set up a productive friction. Light from the street collides with concrete. Air tangles with handrails. Cats confront gravity. ‘Both life and nature are in tension with the architecture,’ they write. ‘They exist together and sometimes connect, but never blend.’ The result is a house that feels more like a chunk of urban geology than a home — a Brutalist mountain lodged in the cityscape, unyielding yet strangely poetic. In resisting comfort, it creates something oddly comforting, a space that’s alive precisely because it’s not trying to be.

two staircases and cat walkways are treated as core structural elements