Modern Japanese Home - Tokyo Life, Shinto, Ryokan-esque
2309
Virtual House Tour
- Japandi
- HDB (BTO)
- ~700 sqft
- 2 br
- Couple Living
よ！ Welcome to the housewarming, glad to see you're here. Hitotema.home is a 700-ish sqft 2 bedder. The home is a modern Japanese (not Japandi, please) style. I'm a Japanese Chef and Sake Sommelier, and the missus does the 9-5. Diametrical jobs eh. 
We wanted a cosy Japanese style home inspired by the elements of old Ryokans and Tokyo mod-trad apartments, lifting loosely off the ethos of the greats - Kengo Kuma, Hiroshi Sugimoto. Upon entering the home through the door, your eyes peel towards the tokonoma. We hang various tenugui on display based on the seasons. This period, the Flower of Edo is on display, a dark blue and pink fireworks display of the bay area for the new year. Our interior design team, Hock Hoon was nothing short of impressive. It's impossible not to recommend them. Not only did they capture our lifestyles, they've brought these core traditional aspects of Japanese homes into the 21st century with impeccable woodwork and craftsmanship. A wooden open-back shoji door separates the living room, or washitsu as we call it, from the entryway. A small step-up demarcates the section where the outside ends and the interior begins, just as you'd expect from the engawa of any pre-Showa Era minka. 
The living room features a remote controlled lift-table that dines 6 comfortably. When not in use, it sits back into the floor, creating an unobstructed space for entertaining guests, watching movies, board games and playing with our dog. In the background, the shoji sliding door that separates the walkway also neatly slides across the tokowashi, creating a play of light and shadow on those aesthetic mood-craving nights. A kamidama guards the house. A kamidama enshrines ofudas from various shinto shrines across Japan. Behind the middle door, the Goddess of the Sun, Amaterasu is enshrined. On the right door is the ofuda of Asakusa Jinja, praying for good fortunes and blessings to that special neighbourhood where my work is done primarily. On the left, I pay respects to Fushimi-Inari Taisha, where the kitsune bless the land with bountiful harvests of rice, tea and sake. When it's just the two of us (we can make it if we try), we use the breakfast bar for meals, drinks, or general things people do. This leads to the kitchen on the right, the powder room down the corridor and the rooms at the back. Round the breakfast bar, a cheeky sign at the window tells you whether the chef is in service or not. Being a professional in the F&B Industry, the kitchen needed to be durable, hygienic and most capable of being able to match up to the rigours of a test-kitchen or private dining space. ANOX was the company we hired to fabricate the countertops. A stainless steel kitchen with clean lines was important. Their work was professional, outstanding and they really stood up to the task of a nearly 100% custom kitchen fabrication. Where's the fridge? Where's the freezers? Aha. Our kitchen sports a lowboy on the right of the stove. It's a commercial fridge, capable of maintaining food longer than almost all home-use fridges. This includes being able to keep fresh sashimi (we could eat a box of uni slowly over a few days) for parties, or milk, stocks, sauces and broths on the cool without worrying about it going bad slowly. We use a chest freezer instead of a traditional freezer. Chest freezers are highly energy saving, and the model we got, I use at the restaurant too. It keeps stuff frozen nicely around -22°C. The fridge keeps stuff tight at -2°C to 2°C. Moving along to the powder room. This is a dry bathroom (no shower). A long mirror stretches across the counter-top, which is the entire length of the bathroom. The missus does her powder and make-up here. Above the toilet bowl, is the Japan-ified version of a familiar meme, with the other half of it visible only after you close the door. Opening the bedroom door, you'll first see the master bathroom sink and a full walk-in wardrobe. The sink is an integrated sink of quartz, and the wardrobes, well, they're wardrobes. All done by the great carpentry team of Hock Hoon. Just another angle of the walk-in wardrobe. There's a sliding door separating the bedroom and the study room from the walk-in wardrobe. If by now you haven't figured it out, yes, we hacked down the wall between the two rooms. This is the bedroom. I'm not sure what more to say, it's a bed...room. The bedroom is a work-in-progress, there's still much to go in the way of decor. One thing we were certain about was that we wanted to have a large space for the bed, a distraction-free, minimal bedroom to have a good night's kip. Also, we didn't want to have the bed visible the moment you enter the master bedroom, it felt too bare and open. There's just one thing left - the study room! But the missus is working in there now. We'll make a post about that space soon i'm sure. Stay tuned!
- 2 March
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