This A-Frame Tent House Is An Elegant Minimalist Retreat

The light-filled Hara house is designed to blend with nature.

Maybe you haven’t seen one in years but we submit to you right now that A-frame home designs are timeless. At least that’s our take after getting a look at this elegantly simple “tent house” designed by Takeru Shoji Architects. 

Okay, so it’s only tent-style, not an actual tent, just to be clear—it’s a permanent structure. These photos aren’t just digital renderings, either, but images from a working home found in Nagaoka city, in Japan’s Niigata prefecture.

With the so-called “Hara House” A-Frame Tent House, Shoji has synthesized modern and ancient elements into a structure that considers neighbors as well as homeowners. From the architect’s website:

Instead of designing a conventional fully self-reliant building, we aspired to create a buoyant and bustling hub. We designed a space where passing neighbors, friends and children can easily stop by to chit chat under the entrance porch, or workshop meetings and events hosted in the space can spill out to the land.

Thus bringing down the threshold of the house and opening it to the village. Thereby extending the building envelope to create a larger semi-public space.

In this open and airy home filled with natural light, you can see the building materials, which gives it an intimate and lived-in feel but also adds to that vital need for internal space, for rooms that breathe.

Takeru Shoji sees this structure as a “singular building” that looks beyond the single-family unit and by its nature works to dissolve “boundaries” thereby creating “the possibility of forming new connections and beginning the creation of a new, strong-knit community.”

Learn more about this innovative firm’s ideas and concepts for building both comfortable homes and more connected communities here: takerushoji.jp.