Taito House

Taito House is a conceptual residence designed by Elif Su Demirkol for an imaginary music-loving family in Taito City, Tokyo, set close to the famous Ueno Park. Every member of the household is connected to music and its study at the Tokyo University of the Arts, and the central design aim was to honor those interests while reflecting the modern culture of the Japanese house. After the user profiles were defined, the process began with a moodboard that shaped the spatial logic across two floors.

The plan organizes 200 square meters into clearly graded zones of privacy. The ground floor holds the less private spaces: an open living and kitchen plan with an indoor court placed at the center of circulation, a cabin-style toilet and hand-wash, and a dedicated acoustic room set in the most discrete part of the layout. The first floor gathers three bedrooms, including the master bedroom, a guest room, and the daughter’s room, along with two bathrooms and one large terrace that opens a wide-angle view onto a zen garden.

Several decisions root the house in Japanese domestic tradition. The entrance includes a simple bench and modular storage, a threshold space for changing shoes that echoes the genkan found in many Japanese homes. In the open living side, cabinets act as separators and modular walls, a flexible approach that lets the household reconfigure the room. Generous sitting units support the entertaining evenings the family hosts with friends.

Designing for music and flexible living

A home built around musicians sits at the meeting point of acoustics and everyday life. Sound isolation, room geometry, and surface treatment all shape how a practice or listening space performs, which is why a dedicated acoustic room is kept apart from the social heart of the plan. Open-plan residential living, by contrast, rewards adaptability, and movable cabinetry lets one volume serve as gathering space one night and quiet retreat the next. The indoor court brings daylight and air deep into the floor plate, a strategy long used in dense urban housing.

Placed near Ueno Park and tied to the city’s cultural life, Taito House reads as a study in how a single family’s passions can give a plan its order, from the shoe-changing bench at the door to the terrace framing the garden above.