A magazine dedicated to compact interiors

Suguru’s widescreen space 60 m² Tokyo, Japan Industrial Radically minimal Loft Suguru Fukuda

This Home Tour is from Sloft Edition 03

There is the traditional Japan, of which the Nihonga paintings offer a good synthesis, and the ultra-techno- logical Japan, which also irrigates an imaginary world that has spread far beyond the borders of the archi-pelago. It is on this side that we must place the flat of the architect Suguru Fukuda, testifying both to the advanced experimentation of the Japanese in terms of habitat — one thinks of the "Capsule Hotels" — and to his own passion for the cinema and its effects.

A 30-minute train ride away from Shibuya and its famously busy crosswalks, Setagaya is a peaceful residential area that still manages to be right in the heart of Tokyo. With fewer skyscrapers than there are schools, the district is home to a number of young families, and where architect and his family found a home in a cor- ner flat on the top floor of a four-story 1980s building. Yet, with three bedrooms and many partition walls, the fragmented floorplan was far from being to the new owners’ taste.

A number of challenges had to be overcome: the kitchen and bathroom could not be moved because of the placement of bearing walls and the age of the drains. The bathroom thus became the starting point of a large “functional strip” along the eastern façade. Together with the bedroom, the WCs and all of the storage space, it is hidden behind a pink wooden interior façade, giving way to a continuously flowing space in which various functions are intertwined. Fixed elements such as the kitchen and an office line the western façade. The rest consists of mobile furniture like a table, benches, and cupboards, like the scenery of a movie set.

Movie buff Fukuda wanted to create cinematographic trompe-l’œils that would influence our perception of the space: "I’ve always been interested in spatial experience in movies. Watching François Truffaut’s Day for Night, I felt like both the space inside and outside of the film were rapidly extending. I wanted to recreate such endless expansion in a real space." He chose to visually lower the ceiling down to 1.85 meters using gray paint and "stretching" the horizontal areas through the use of colors such as pink in order to create a 16:9 ratio, successfully making the space look wider than it really is. So it’s not Welcome to Gattaca, but to Setagaya!