Figure - Ground / Studio Takuya Hosokai

A beauty salon in a provincial city.  The project took 8 months from design to completion. The site, about a 10-minute drive from the city center, is located in a quiet neighborhood that was converted to a residential area in 1927.  When we visited the site for the first time, we felt that there are many buildings in this area that are composed of multiple small volumes in an inconsistent physical scale, such as an entrance, a bay window, a terrace, a warehouse, and a garage. In addition, although the buildings are reasonably tall, the streetscape has an intimate sense of scale because its composition allows the line of sight to pass through to the open sky.