This wooden house in Yokohama by Japanese architects Suppose Design Office has a garden behind its walls and a roof terrace beneath a ceiling.

After entering though the front door, residents must first cross a pebbled courtyard filled with plants to access the rooms of the three-storey house.

One staircase leads down to bedrooms on the sunken ground floor, while another leads up a first-floor living room.

The terrace and a bathroom occupy the second floor above, separated from one another by nothing but glazing.

Suppose Design Office have designed quite a few interesting houses - see more of their projects here.

Photography is by Toshiyuki Yano.

Here's a little more information from the architects:

House in Seya

We have all ways have been interested in Nature.

Nature that expresses time and change are some aspects that we try to incorporate in Architecture.
Everybody feels and knows that the sky, sea, and forest are big but why does everyone feel this way? Would it be that when a person feels lost in the scale of things they start to feel that the thing is big.

Scale is something important in architecture. That it why always think of size and height. If nature and architecture were to be the same and to have a close relationship with each other then when the scale is taken away from architecture or scale is added to nature then there might be a new relation ship created between architecture and nature.

The house in Seya is on a small site located in a residential area. The client works in a flower shop and wanted a house that looks in harmony with flowers and vegetations.

It is the norm to erect walls to enclose a space for a building but for the house in Seya we decided to enclose the outer space. This resulted in the creation of a space where it is neither a garden nor a room.

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The outer shell was built like a wooden storage and once the residence moved in to the space, by time there will be an increase in plants, book shelves or painting in the space will have the same quality as what nature where everything is in a state where it is neither finished nor unfinished.

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It was important that the client accepted that this architecture was in the process of change and that it came from the idea of adding scale to Nature, which resulted in the nature become closer to architecture and an architecture closer to nature.

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Rather then creating architecture that is completed but to create an architecture that is unfinished which lead to the creation of a new relationship between the internal and external spaces.

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The creation of this uncompleted space gives the space the quality to accept any kind of elements to be placed and give true strength to the versatility of the space. The uncompleted state can produce a rich space and we would like to continue to think about thee kind of space.

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Location: Seya,Yokohama,Kanagawa,Japan
Principal use: single family house
Structural Engineer: Ohno Japan
Main Structure: Timber construction ( subset of structure is Concrete )
Site Area: 73.22 sqm
Building area: 36.09sqm
Total floor area: 57.03sqm
Completion : April. 2011
Design period: August. 2009 - September. 2011
Construction period: February. 2010-February. 2011
Project team: Suppose design office | Makoto Tanijiri, in charge: Ai Yoshida