Casa Paisaje by TAP Arquitectura

Casa Paisaje by TAP Arquitectura is an unbuilt design for a single-storey house of 302 square metres in the forests of Yakushima, the island in Japan’s Kagoshima Prefecture. Developed in 2025 as a competition proposal, the scheme sets out to place a home inside an ecologically valuable forest without trying to compete with it, keeping the building low and quiet so that the trees, the rocks and the terrain stay in charge.

A courtyard built around the rocks on the site

The starting point is the ground itself. Instead of clearing the boulders already sitting on the plot, the architects treat them as the foundation of the plan: a central courtyard is drawn around them, and the house is organised as a rectangle that wraps this open void. Light, planting and stone are brought into the middle of the home through that opening, and the courtyard becomes the place where the building, the landscape and Japanese tradition meet.

Everything happens on one level. The shared rooms, living, kitchen and dining, sit at the centre of the plan with direct access to the courtyard and to longer views out, while the bedrooms and other private rooms are pushed to the four corners. The subtitle of the project, Cuatro Esquinas en el Bosque, or four corners in the forest, describes this split between a common heart and retreats placed at the edges.

Circulation is a single loop around the courtyard. Rather than keeping a constant width, the corridor widens and narrows along its length, which lets the plan pull in daylight at some points, frame a particular view at others, and link the social rooms to the private ones without a hard threshold between them.

Engawa, dry garden and a low gable

The references are openly Japanese. The edge between inside and outside is handled as an engawa, the covered veranda zone of traditional Japanese architecture, so that residents can sit in the forest while staying out of the rain and sun. In the courtyard, a karesansui dry garden of raked gravel and moss is set out in dialogue with the existing boulders, the same kind of contemplative landscape discussed in our guide to designing a Japanese garden.

Above it all, a low-pitched gable roof finished in asphalt shingles stretches the composition horizontally and keeps the silhouette below the canopy. The roofing choice is tied to the island’s wet climate rather than to image.

Inside, the living room steps down slightly from the surrounding floor. The small change of level gives the seating area a sense of enclosure while the glazing on both long sides keeps the forest in view. The bathroom is treated as its own sensory room, a dark, textured volume with the bath set against a low opening onto the trees.

Black concrete, charred timber and the forest as material

The material palette is deliberately short. Pigmented black concrete forms the floors and ceilings, giving the interior a single continuous tone and the thermal mass to steady temperatures. Timber finished with the yakisugi technique, in which the surface is charred to resist moisture and weathering, is used for the enclosing surfaces, and the asphalt shingle roof completes the envelope. The architects count the forest, the rocks and the changing light as materials of the house in their own right.

Arrival is choreographed as a gradual approach. A curving drive climbs through the trees to a covered entrance, and from there the house reads as one dark, horizontal volume sitting into the slope rather than rising above it. As the proposal was not built, the images shown here are renderings and axonometric drawings prepared by TAP Arquitectura, the architecture and landscape studio that works across residential, public space, urban, tourism and institutional projects.